What is the fastest web browser?

In my opinion Safari is the best for Mac. You can have all three browsers installed.

Use any one of those.

IMHO there is more to a browser the its speed. How it integrates with rest of the operating system is also a consideration. There is also ease of use. When everything it taking into account I find that Safari is best for me. It may not be the fastest but I am able to get more done with then any other browser I have tried to use.

Allan

It's really down to personal preference as to which you use. They all perform similarly in terms of speed. Each handles different aspects of a web page differently. One may be slightly faster on one site, but not another and vice-versa. As Allan Eckert said, there's more to the browser than speed. I typically have Safari, Chrome, and Firefox installed. There are times where I might encounter a problem on a site and find it works with one of the other browsers. My main reason for using Chrome is because Flash is integrated into it and regularly updated. This way I can avoid the need to actually install Flash on my system.

thebunnys wrote:

What is the fastest web browser for my macbook pro?\

Would it be safari, firefox, google chrome...

Safari is currently the fastest according to tests, because Apple gives it special OS X attention that other browsers don't seem to have access too, according to the Ars Tech testers. Safari seems to run now from a process called WebProcess, so it seems to be some validity to that.

Firefox is currently the fastest browser on Windows, with Chrome a close second.

Firefox and Chrome are about the same on OS X, fighting for second place.

Safari is dead last below IE in everything on Windows, speed and likeable factor, I think Apple is consdering removing it, because the online download version hasn't been updated.

All three major browsers work so well on a fast Internet connection that there is relatively little real world difference, it's really a matter of choice and comfort, with Firefox having the widest possible choices of add-ons, customization and so forth to tailor one's browsing to one's liking.

Chrome in my opinion is just another Google freebie to data mine your Internet activity to target advertising and profile you online.

Firefox is the people's browser of choice for customization options galore. It also has the best "web cop" on the Internet, the NoScript add-on that protects against a lot of web side trickery.

Safari, although faster, is sad joke on both platforms in my opinion, it's too confining and assuming (in typical Apple "one size fits all" fashion) that they know what your going to like. The add-on choices are very few.

Firefox can be *cough* tweaked *cough* to be extremely fast if you have a broadband connection. In fact mine is so fast that I sometime render web pages wrong as the server can't keep up. 😉

They are all free. Download them and try them for yourself. See which works best for your browsing needs.

I am using Safari since 2years. I find it very easy & fast when compared to Firefox & Google Chrome as 3rd party plugins & extra stuff are not required for the browser. Its plain & simple. I hate Google Chrome as they keep releasing beta updates on daily basis which shows that they do not have a stable browser. Firefox is not a match in front of Safari..

I hate Google Chrome as they keep releasing beta updates on daily basis which shows that they do not have a stable browser

That's actually not the case. Chrome is in constant development. Google simply allows users the option to try the beta releases if they wish. This doesn't mean there are stability issues or problems. FireFox actually does the same thing. Apple very seldom allows users to try pre-release versions of updated applications. There are ups and downs to both methods. If your adventerous and like to try out new versions or if you're experiencing a unique problem and you want to see if it's fixed in the next version, being able to download and try out the latest version (and by latest, they actually have daily builds) is something you might want to do. There is a risk in trying the beta versions however as they may be unstable (that's why they're beta versions). By not allowing users to try out pre-release versions, you can be sure that what everyone is using is a "known" factor. Users won't experience any of the potential problems that might crop up in beta versions. Apple prefers to control the users environment and they don't like having their own applications crash. Google and Mozilla (Firefox) allow the users to make that decision. You can stay with a stable release or try out a beta which may be buggy.

Seucrity speaking your likely best on Firefox than Safari, as Mozilla will roll out a update in short order, pull bad certs and so forth, there are more eyeballs looking at the code.

Apple is the worst, they take their dam sweet time and allow malware to develop and when it goes public then they do something about it, so they are not very quick on the draw in preventing issues, rather waiting until a general update occurs then do things all at once. So it coudl be months or even a year one time before a necessary security issue is resolved.

Safari, iTunes and Chrome are based upon Webkit, which have numerous security issues.

Google has paid out tons of cash to white hats to find the flaws in Chrome and always issusing updates.

Depending upon one's perspective, this could mean that Webkit is fundamentally flawed and requires constant repair because it is so bad, or that there are always flaws and better be on a browser that they get always get fixed.

Security speaking one is likely better on Firefox or Chrome than on Safari, just for the fact that malware often targets the most used combination, and Safari is rather weak security speaking. One can't turn off Flash or Silverlight in Safari for instance like the can do in Firefox.

I used to swear by Firefox. I feel that for a while, they were sort of the only reasonable option.

I've switched back to Safari. I've realized that all the endless tweaking and features in Firefox are just overkill, and Safari just seems snappier to me right now.

I am happy to hear that ARS's tests bear this out, that right now Safari is fastest on the Mac. But Firefox will probably catch up at some point.

Speed in a Web Browser is a funny thing to complain about... slowness aggravation in Web browsers is usually do to the internet connection or problems on the site you are visiting. But I swing in and out of my browser a dozen times an hour, pop open sites from links in Mail, and so forth... and Safari definitely appears to be fastest for those sort of operations.

One thing I dislike about Safari: Clearing Firefox's cache is VERY thorough. I am a technical writer, and sometimes I upload a new version of my CMS and all my browsers seem to hold on to the old version. If I wipe my cache in Firefox, it pulls the new version. Wiping the cache in Safari doesn't seem to do that (maybe it wipes some pages but keeps some in cache somehow, or keeps the record of redirects in memory, or similar.) So it seems the software engineers who built Safari wrote in some clever caching that makes browsing faster but makes it impossible to fully wipe out the cache so I can test being a fresh user to a site.

Apple has rolled out a Safari update for all versions, Windows and Mac, since this thread first started.

If one enables the Firefox broadband tweaks (and has broadband), enables a hosts file addition, ad block plus, NoScript, I can tell you that Firefox renders web pages a heck of a lot faster than Safari, in fact so fast that I sometimes get errors. 🙂

It's because I'm stripping all the crap out and only rendering what I need, which Firefox allows better control that any other browser.

However that's not the default setting which the tests are based on.

So technically, Firefox is the fastest major browser IF you know how to go about making it the fastest browser.

Excellent summary, ds store, thanks!

I used to be such a big addon/tweak/interface junky... and lately I've just been letting that go. I want one tool that I never have to do anything to.

Guess I'm becoming even more of an "Apple Philosophy" user in my old age.

On the other hand, I REALLY liked Evernote's "Clearly" on Firefox... guess I haven't QUITE given up my add-on addictions...

I've used Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Chrome, IMO, is by far the fastest.