Opera, Chrome Both Faster than a... Potato?

Google Chrome trying to usurp the "Speed" crown.

But Opera reiterates that it is (still) the Fastest Browser on Earth (for now).

 

The first thing to wonder is whether the Google test is really as accurate and objective as it seems. It might have been manipulated to make Google Chrome look this fast. Computers can do amazing things you know.
If, for the sake of argument, we assume that the Google test is indeed accurate, then we should ask ourselves (at least I am) whether all these speed improvements would even matter on computer that also has some additional software that might slow down the Internet browsing experience like firewalls, antivirus software; or whether this lightning speed would help if the Internet provider is just not-so-good/crappy.
Thirdly, if we assume the Google test was accurate, one has a good ISP, and there are no other programs that slow down the Internet on a computer, we should also ask ourselves whether a second or so in loading speed difference is really that bad and intolerable.

Don't get me wrong, I love Opera and respect Chrome, but I think they are too obsessed with this speed thing. I'd rather have the developers work on making the browsers lighter (on resources), more stable, fixing bugs and making them more compatible with other software in general. Not that they aren't doing that already, but I'd rather they make those things their main focus, and not the speed.
But then again this is a marketing thing so I guess it won't go away, since we all know how (more) important marketing is than any other department.

Oh, and seeing the Google test it kind of makes me sad that Google would dedicate so much time and resources for this, and not listen to what users have to say about their services, like the Google Sidebar crap for example.

'Tis a mixed up world we live in...

 

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Agreed. Whether or not browser speed makes a difference depends on where the bottleneck is. How quickly the browser starts is not of great importance to me since that's a one time event. If the ISP or a specific website is slow it's not going to matter how quickly the browser can render the page. What I consider more important is the responsiveness of the browser GUI when creating, switching or deleting tabs, opening menus, etc. FF, Opera and Chrome are all fine in this regard. On the other hand IE8 always lags for me and I've used it on multiple systems.

It's fine to keep optimizing java script, but the next level for browsers to compete on is GPU acceleration. Image and video resolution continue to climb and offloading the CPU to the GPU is going to improve performance a lot.

 

Personally I am very glad that my browser (Opera) can beat a potato in a speed test. Sometimes it seems like IE cannot do that.

 

Pretty funny. My browsers are all faster than.. adobe products lol.

I fail to see the point in these speed comparisons though. Any given machine of the exact same hardware might be able to prove which is speedier on it, but the vast differences in hardware don't allow any program to empirically say "I am the fastest". For me on most of my machines, I am hard pressed to find any differences between opera,chrome or kmeleon. Firefox and IE are perceptibly slower. Some machines though do I would have to say either opera or chrome have a speed difference you can actually note over the others.

Sul.

 

Agreed, and I don't see much speed difference either. If there is any, it's too small to perceive and too small to matter.

 

For me chrome is fast; Iron is fast, I just started using Comodo dragon it is based on chrome's engine so it is also fast. I have teamed it up with tor, I used to use Firefox but it just is tooo slow (Tor is slow al by itself with Firefox you could fall asleep waiting for something to load). The video is pretty funny

 

Well, I just watched the videos and I must say I really do like the potato. After all, you can get fries out of it. In the meantime, while you are waiting for the fries, you can search the web using either Opera or Chrome. The best of both worlds IMO.

Oh, I liked the Chrome video more but it will not make me switch from using Opera and eating potatoes.

 

Opera is more than a browser, its a suite and people keep forgetting that, it handles way more stuff than Chrome and still manages to keep its speed, now thats commendable in every sense. Recently OMG Ubuntu did a informal test with a beta of Opera for Linux against Chrome and found Opera to be quicker.

 

How fast is fast...