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Is the Opera browser the fastest on the net?
Quote from Opera.com
Speed
We're holding on to our claim: "The Fastest Browser on Earth". In Opera 8, further improvements have been made in the way the browser reads pages to allow you to fly the Web.
end quote
What's a good site to test I wondered? Well I used www.shockwave.com, that has a lot of stuff to load on the first page. So here's how I tested Opera's claim. I used an ADSL 1.544Mbps downstream/256Kbps upstream from TPG in Australia. My system is an AMD Athlon 2700+, with 1GB DDR333 Ram and only the approriate browser open at the time. I compared the page load times of www.shockwave.com through the four most used browsers, Opera, Firefox, Netscape and IE. Each browser was the latest release from their companies as of 22/09/2005. I reloaded the page ten times and then calcualted the average loading time for www.shockwave.com.
I have some very interesting results.
Firefox
* Fastest load time, 6.6 seconds.
* Slowest load time, 8.1 seconds.
* Average load time, 7.5 seconds.
Opera
* Fastest load time, 7.4 seconds
* Slowest load time, 9.6 seconds
* Average load time, 8.6 seconds
Internet Explorer
* Fastest load time, 9.8 seconds
* Slowest load time, 15.5 seconds
* Average load time, 12.1 seconds
Netscape 8.0
* Fastest load time, 9.0 seconds
* Slowest load time, 9.6 seconds
* Average load time, 9.3 seconds
It's interesting to note that while Netscape and Firefox use the firefox engine, Netscape is slower than Firefox yet more consistent in its page load time. IE is by far the worst performer.
So Opera's claim to be the fastest browser on the web is busted for me. Firefox was 1.6 seconds faster overall. To trully test this to the limit I would like people on dial-up and broadband in other countries to do the same. Test the load times and post them here. Let's get right down to the nitty gritty of it.