After the first Battle of the Netbook Web Browsers on my Dell Mini 10v hackintosh, I’ve switched over from Safari to Google Chrome as my default web browser on all the Macs I have at home. Why, you may ask? Well, I have two reasons for changing.

First, I really like the integrated address bar and search box in Google Chrome. It simplifies the two things I do most in the web browser, surfing and searching. I can just type a URL or search criteria in the same place.

Second, performance. Google Chrome somehow felt snappier compared to the other browsers. So, I decided to confirm what I felt by running a performance test with the different web browsers on my Mini 10v laptop.

The Performance Test Suite

I decided on using the Dromaeo Javascript Performance Test Suite after trying out two other JavaScript performance benchmark, SunSpider and Peacekeeper. Dromaeo is comprehensive yet simple to execute. It is made up of Javascript and DOM tests created by the Dromaeo, Webkit, V8 and MooTools team. The test suite also includes DOM test for the jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, MooTools, YUI and ExtJS javascript libraries.

The full Dromaeo Performance Test runs for an estimated 33 mins 40 seconds on the web browser. The fastest web browser will be the one that executes the most test runs per second. So, which web browser is the fastest?

The Test Results

Google Chrome wins the web browser performance trophy on my Dell Mini 10v. It finished in the top spot slightly ahead of Safari. The slowest web browser? Camino. It’s time for me to remove Camino from my laptop. Apart from being slow, it has nothing special. I don’t see any reason why anyone would want to use Camino.

Dromaeo stores a copy the detailed score of each web browser tested. You can check out the details with the links below.

• Safari 4.0.3
• Firefox 3.5.3
• Google Chrome 4.0.221
• Opera 10
• Camino 1.6.10
• Comparing Safari (WebKit/531.9), Firefox (Firefox/3.5.3) and Google Chrome(WebKit/532.2).

The Conclusion

The test confirms that Google Chrome is the fastest web browser on my hackintosh laptop. I will continue to have Google Chrome as my default web browser.

But the truth is for most people, they will not sense the performance difference between the browsers tested. The bottleneck is usually with the internet connection rather than javascript performance. Just keep using whichever web browser that fits your browsing style.

As for me, I’m very happy with Google Chrome. Google Chrome full screen view and performance ROCKS on the Mini 10v hackintosh laptop.

dromaeo, javascript-benchmark, web browsers