Which Browsers are the Fastest? [Real User Performance Data]
We’ve come quite a long way since introducing RUM (Real User Monitoring) about a year ago. Being the first app performance company to build real user monitoring as a core, native feature of application performance management, we are currently monitoring about 750 million page views a day, 5 billion a week and 20 billion a month for 20,000 active accounts. Our real user monitoring javascript is found on over 150,000 unique domains on the internet. This puts us in the unique position of being able to comment credibly on the state of web performance from the end user perspective. And while we’re sitting on what can plausibly be considered the world’s largest database of application performance data in existence, it’s clear that we have entered the realm of Big Data. Our goal is to share this data so that it can be used to better ensure top-notch app performance. And to be sure, web performance is fast becoming a high-profile topic as our lives become more and more intertwined with the web.
And here’s the latest Real User Performance data that we’d like to share with you…
– Browsing speed is improving: Last year the average click took 6 seconds, this year it’s 5.5 seconds, with an Apdex customer satisfaction score of .87 (good, but not great).
– Chrome on Mac is by far the fastest experience: Specifically Chrome 13 on Mac took just under 2.5 seconds (2.4 seconds to be exact!):
– Internet Explorer is still in the game: IE is the most popular browser in use on Windows (40%):
– And IE is the most used overall on desktops and laptops with 36% share:
– IE 9 beats out all the others in speed test on Windows:
– Chrome is closing the gap: it’s the number two browser across OSs, with roughly 33% of share on Windows:
– And Chrome enjoys a 19% share of browsing on Mac:
– Mobile browsing is almost twice as slow as PC or desktop browsing: Fastest speed on mobile averages 6.2 seconds. And the fastest mobile experience is Blackberry Opera Mini! Who knew?:
– Desktop and laptop browsers are twice as fast as mobile at 2.58 seconds on average:
Data snapshot from March 22, 2012 between the hours of 12 noon and 3 pm PT. During this period, New Relic monitored browser performance at the rate of approximately 690,000 page views per minute.
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Wouldn’t the Opera Mini load time really be the time it takes to load a page from Opera’s servers? I forget which of the Opera browsers renders pages on the server and sends a clickable image over to the client.
Posted: 5 April 2012 at 8:00 am by Philip
Is it me or is the graph “Ten faster browsers on PC” actually showing Mac browsers?
Posted: 5 April 2012 at 9:24 am by Ilya
The “10 Fastest For” lists are interesting, but not that useful. Nobody’s going to switch to Blackberry just to get a faster browser. I’d love to see it broken down by platform. And could you make the lists long enough so that there’s room for all the widely-used browsers? I’d love to see how the default Android browser and some of its popular forks stack up.
Posted: 5 April 2012 at 12:26 pm by Isaac Rabinovitch
@Ilya – Ten Fastest Browsers on Windows [not PC BTW] is showing Windows browser application results for me.
Then again, the authors might have had time to remarkup this page following your post earlier today and if so, owe you a word of thanks. Otherwise … •~
In any case, by and large, even including the impressive result from the betaware IE9, Mac browsing looks fastest by far pretty much regardless of browser type.
Posted: 5 April 2012 at 12:45 pm by cybero
A Macintosh is a Personal Computer (PC). Those of us not in marketing recognize many PC operating systems including Apple’s OS.
Posted: 5 April 2012 at 1:10 pm by Tim
4 seconds to open chrome ? are you joking ?
On my PC ( windows 7, 64bits, intel corei7 )
IE 9, FF 11 and chrome 18 open in less than a second…
Posted: 5 April 2012 at 1:35 pm by YopSolo
Thanks for posting this — it’s interesting.
The difference between overall Mac and Windows speeds seems suspicious to me, however. Due to recent increases in Mac market share, I would hazard a guess that the average Mac machine is newer (and therefore faster) than the average Windows machine. Furthermore, even if the age distributions were the same, the average Mac computers would be more likely to be faster than Windows ones, simply because Mac computers tend to have faster components (and consequently higher price tags). Does your data take into account the hardware configurations of the machines?
Also — 12 noon to 3pm PT is late evening in Europe and the middle of the night/early morning in Australasia. I don’t know what domains New Relic’s Javscript runs on, but it seems reasonable to assume that these results are highly North America-centric. Any further data on the geographic breakdown of the browsers would be interesting.
Posted: 5 April 2012 at 2:34 pm by John Jensen
No, don’t think so mate, these are all wrong for me.
I have IE and Chrome, have tried Firefox in the past too. Firefox was dumped within a week b/c it kept freezing, I have IE for some of the things Chrome cannot do but Chrome by far is faster then IE and doesn’t get as affected if I have multiple tabs open.
IE takes a few seconds to open, then freezes, Chrome takes less then a second and freezes far less frequently. (The freezing is probably due to my computer being too small for its use)
Posted: 5 April 2012 at 4:12 pm by qwerty
I’d like to look at the ideas put forth by John Jensen a bit differently. I’m sure that there are many way to explain the faster Mac numbers. The Mac numbers don’t contain any low end POS netbooks. Acer sold a boatload of them. I’ve seen what $400 buys you at Best Buy. That’s gotta be dragging the Windows numbers down.
This also helps to explain YopSolo’s claim of faster numbers than anybody.
Posted: 5 April 2012 at 6:04 pm by Info Dave
tnx for the helpful post…….
Posted: 5 April 2012 at 9:33 pm by monstercourses
All browsers are quite fast rendering pages. Chrome is the fastest on Windows, then comes Opera and FF.
The most convenient to use is definitely Opera. By comfort level it is unreachable. Addons in FF and Chrome can’t reach the same level of comfort, speed, compatibility and resource consumption. So for me it is the choice.
But for most users that need simple and fast browser that does the job – Chrome is my recommendation.
Posted: 5 April 2012 at 10:58 pm by Psi
I agree with the previous commenter absolutely.
And I think that the mac values are better, because there arent any low- or midspec mac computers around there, but most windows pcs are more like mid or lowspec
Posted: 6 April 2012 at 12:37 am by Akaltar
Where are the Linux stats?
Posted: 7 April 2012 at 1:35 am by H2CO3
Results look semi-consistent with my experiences, but don’t agree on the “speed of mac”.. brand new macbook air, powers in 10s. only chrome and coda installed.. chrome takes also 10s to start..
while it’s there instantly (+/-1s) on all pc’s I use
Posted: 7 April 2012 at 8:21 am by Tom Hermans
These are interesting browser performance results, especially relating to Opera .
Given the insane speed of the cloud-based Opera Mini on Blackberry, my guess is that Opera Mini on iPhone, iPad and Android would show identical speeds…but for some reason Opera was excluded on those platforms.
Note that Opera was not included on Mac OS X, for some reason, as well.
Hopefully you can include it, on those other platforms as well. Opera’s Presto rendering is a big time-saver for all users & web site designers, on a myriad of platforms…and deserves to be given a fair shake.
(Btw, what the heck is “Android Safari 4.0″ and “Android Safari 5.0″…?)
Posted: 9 April 2012 at 5:47 pm by ktop
I too would like a speed comparison that included Firefox and Chromium on Ubuntu Linux boxen … as I run Xubuntu on a Cybertron PC with dual AthlonX2 processors. How about it?
Posted: 9 April 2012 at 11:21 pm by B. R. Ashley
IE9 fastest on windows? You must be kidding me
Posted: 10 April 2012 at 1:41 am by Pratyush Nalam
I’m surprised more people don’t use Opera, it has the speeds performance on even the low-end systems, and the best advanced options on default install by comparison to all other browsers. Its like the royalty of the browser software on the market.. No need for any plug-ins or apps or whatever.
Posted: 10 April 2012 at 3:45 am by E-bert
When an “article” uses the terms Android Safari 4.0 and Android Safari 5.0, it becomes abundantly clear as to why IE9 is ranked as the fastest browser on the Windows platform… I.E. the author has no idea what he/she is talking about.
Posted: 10 April 2012 at 9:00 am by Joe
And this matters for what reason?
Posted: 11 April 2012 at 1:38 pm by Pixel kid
Now repeat all the browser tests using encrypted (ssl) connections and see the significant performance drops in IE.
Posted: 11 April 2012 at 5:08 pm by Grant
Would be interesting to include Opera in the Windows/Mac tests. Seems strange to exclude them when their 2x market share of Safari of Windows.
Posted: 12 April 2012 at 2:48 am by Matterly nope
These are just load times. With apps moving to the web, what’s more interesting is how fast and smooth javascript executes. Chrome’s javascript engine (V8) is way way faster than IE9′s and somewhat faster than Firefox’s, in my experience.
Posted: 13 April 2012 at 2:43 am by Rory Koehein
Another possible breakdown for your stats are by countries.
The browser market shares are wildly different depending on the country.
Another bias exists for servers: language of the service and/or scope of the service, if for example the service is addressing the local community (a local news Web site).
The Global stats are hiding a very different local story.
Posted: 13 April 2012 at 11:37 am by karl
Is it reliable?
since the Firefox has never been faster than Chrome in my laptop
I’ll say DEFINITELY CHROME
Posted: 14 April 2012 at 8:47 am by JJ
I think you need to be breaking down 32 v 64 bit browsers as, empirically Mozilla x64 is faster than 32 bit Firefox and 32 bit IE
Posted: 14 April 2012 at 1:43 pm by UB
IE takes minutes to start!
It is the most awful creation of stupid Microsoft
Posted: 15 April 2012 at 3:56 am by Nick
I use Win7. IE 9 is very fast. Chrome is faster, but i prefer the way IE handles my favourites Chrome contradicts itself – on the one hand it uses less space for stuff so you have more screen for viewing but THEN it has these BLOODY toolbars – i hate them!!!!!!!! Safari on my Win7 is SLOW
Posted: 15 April 2012 at 6:29 am by Mackydee1977
Internet Explorer sucks! Compared with Chrome it’s f*cking slow and has a lot of pop-ups, IE supports a lot of stuff but I think it’s more popular because people are too lazy to check out other browsers, Take a look at RockMelt for example. Peace.
Posted: 16 April 2012 at 5:34 am by Tobias
So Opera Mini with its 2.6 sec by far exceeds Opera Dektop version? Not even on the list “Ten Fastest Browsers on Windows”? Sth must be wrong.
Posted: 17 April 2012 at 2:54 am by Loronzo
Personally chrome works best for me.
Used firefox in the past but since the big changes not happy about it’s performance anymore. Havn’t tested latest versions yet but i’m not that eager to try it out.
As for IE i believe IE is fast however this probably with all addons turned off.
And with addons i don’t mean special things but stuff you need for sites ex. flash.
I use Chrome on desktops and Opera on mobile and the combination is perfect.
Posted: 17 April 2012 at 4:40 am by Karel
There is a shift change going on in the browser market, with users becoming more aware of alternative software… and speed will be one thing that will always influence a change.
The rise of Mobile Phone Browser usage, and iPad / Tablet usage is also a notable change in the last two years, which will only increase as Tablets become PC Replacement devices.
Mike.
Posted: 24 April 2012 at 3:51 am by Web Design Macclesfield