Safari: Not really that fast

leonisleonis
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
I have been using a lot of broswers lately



Camino, Safari, Mozilla, Netscape, IE, Opera, Firebird....



Some browsers are faster on some sites but slower on some. But one thing for sure that Safari is NOT the fastest browser that Apple claims. Sometimes it's the second slowest (with IE being the slowest all the time)....in extreme cases it took twice the time (of the fastest ones) to load the page.



Camino and Mozilla are so far the fastest in my testing.....but some site are very slow with these browsers (especially to the sites with unicode)....don't know why.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 45
    gargoylegargoyle Posts: 660member
    In order to really make that test, you would actually have to load all the pages from a local net, or the hard disk.



    You could just hit bottle necks, drop a packet and have to wait for the retry, sometimes these AI pages take 2 seconds to load... sometimes they take 20, you can't actually test the speed of a web browser accurately on the web... Weird eh?



  • Reply 2 of 45
    leonisleonis Posts: 3,427member
    .....but Safari stalls quite a lot....
  • Reply 3 of 45
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Leonis

    .....but Safari stalls quite a lot....



    Not for me, it doesn't.
  • Reply 4 of 45
    gargoylegargoyle Posts: 660member
    Nor me!
  • Reply 5 of 45
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    Mozilla blows Safari away, there is no competition. It stalls a lot. They should have an option to enable pipelining.
  • Reply 6 of 45
    johnqjohnq Posts: 2,763member
    Safari stalls due to behind the scenes bugs with prebinding processes running when Safari-related services are called. It's not Safari, it's Mac OS X. For what it's worth, I've not experienced this with Panther. fix_prebinding/redo_prebinding bug is fixed in Panther.
  • Reply 7 of 45
    dmband0026dmband0026 Posts: 2,345member
    I love Safari. I used to use IE and I will never go back. I've never used any of the other browsers that you have listed, but I aint gonna fix what aint broke. I'm very happy with the speed and compatibility.
  • Reply 8 of 45
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    Being faster than IE doesn't mean much. My grandmother is faster then IE.
  • Reply 9 of 45
    ryaxnbryaxnb Posts: 583member
    I use Safari. But here's an interesting link. It shows that Camino and Firebird (Mozilla offshoots) are generally faster.
  • Reply 10 of 45
    alcimedesalcimedes Posts: 5,486member
    Camino rocks. i won't use anything else.
  • Reply 11 of 45
    vandewaalsvandewaals Posts: 450member
    Speaking of which...when is Camino 0.8 going to arrive? Are they just focusing on developing Firebird for OS X?
  • Reply 12 of 45
    1337_5l4xx0r1337_5l4xx0r Posts: 1,558member
    They both rock, for different reasons. But for speed, hands down, Mozilla and its offspring rule. Especially since BNOYTHAUB enlightened us about customized prefs.js



    pipelining, keeping multiple connections open, etc give mozilla the edge.
  • Reply 13 of 45
    cookiescookies Posts: 61member
    Safari and Konqueror's JavaScript both are awful.



    http://www.myersdaily.org/joseph/jav...peed-test.html



    It is the speed with which it is integrated that is good.



    Which is why it runs slower on a test like this:



    http://www.myersdaily.org/joseph/jav...n-numbers.html



    (918 ms, for reference on IE6)



    And faster on a test like this:



    http://www.myersdaily.org/joseph/jav...n-numbers.html



    (3422 ms by the same computer, IE6)



    Quote:

    Originally posted by Leonis

    I have been using a lot of broswers lately



    Camino, Safari, Mozilla, Netscape, IE, Opera, Firebird....



    Some browsers are faster on some sites but slower on some. But one thing for sure that Safari is NOT the fastest browser that Apple claims. Sometimes it's the second slowest (with IE being the slowest all the time)....in extreme cases it took twice the time (of the fastest ones) to load the page.



    Camino and Mozilla are so far the fastest in my testing.....but some site are very slow with these browsers (especially to the sites with unicode)....don't know why.



  • Reply 14 of 45
    chinneychinney Posts: 1,019member
    I have been trying out Safari for the last couple of weeks at home ? I need something to replace my now-orphaned Netscape (which I was probably the last person to be using on OSX). So far I don?t like Safari all that much. It is not all that smooth, nor do I find it breathtakingly fast. I am not sure that I like the brushed metal look very much in a browser. And my number one complaint is that I can?t get the default input fonts to reset: that means that each time I open the AI input screen, for example, I get to type my post in a teeny-tiny font that I can barely see. I can change the font manually for that post, but the next time I try to do an input, it resets back to the tiny font. Annoying. I think that I will be downloading Camino next and try it out.
  • Reply 15 of 45
    mortigi tempomortigi tempo Posts: 107member
    I like Safari- I use it every day. It seems plenty fast.



    I just wish it worked with more sites. It's not even obscure ones that don't seem to work- www.lastminute.com, www.thetrainline.com for example are 2 sites that I use all the time to book travel here in Britain, and they both choke Safari but work in IE and Mozilla.



    Say what you like about the speed of IE, there's far fewer sites that it doesn't handle than Safari in my experience.
  • Reply 16 of 45
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    I tried downloading Firebird after reading that review on Ars. Just to give it a try. It seemed pretty fast, yeah, really fast! Especially when going back or forward, it was faster than Safari... basically instantaneous. But I discovered a really weird bug that appears in both the latest nightly build and the official 0.6.1 release. Occasionally a window will completely refuse to respond and I'll have to quit the application and start it again to have it obey me when I click return after entering a URL. Also, it doesn't download images properly through the contextual menu, you MUST drag them to the desktop for it to work. And there's no keyboard command for selecting the tab to the left or right of the current one.



    I'm sticking with Safari. Safari actually is 1.0-quality. Mozilla, Firebird, and all similar browsers are still betas, and they probably always will be. IE is crap, Opera is crap, iCab is crap (although they do provide tabbed browsing for 68ks!), and OmniWeb is promising but still not there yet (I want tabs).
  • Reply 17 of 45
    kelibkelib Posts: 740member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by 1337_5L4Xx0R

    They both rock, for different reasons. But for speed, hands down, Mozilla and its offspring rule. Especially since BNOYTHAUB enlightened us about customized prefs.js



    pipelining, keeping multiple connections open, etc give mozilla the



    Don't fool your self. The sad fact is that all the Mac web browsers out there suck big time. The Mac is great, OsX is great, the whole Mac concept is great. But as a web surfing tool the Mac simply SUX. Blame it on MS Java, blame it on lazy web developers (that don't bother testing their sites on a Mac), blame it on whatever you like. If you like to browse the net fast, with no compatibility issues, the only way to go is Windows. Hopefully this will change, but right now it's just a simple matter of fact, the Mac isn't quite up to it
  • Reply 18 of 45
    ryaxnbryaxnb Posts: 583member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Luca Rescigno

    Safari actually is 1.0-quality. Mozilla, Firebird, and all similar browsers are still betas, and they probably always will be. IE is crap, Opera is crap, iCab is crap (although they do provide tabbed browsing for 68ks!), and OmniWeb is promising but still not there yet (I want tabs).



    Mozilla is not a beta. It's in 1.4 stage, quite past beta actually. If you've been using Mozilla 0.9 or 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, iBet you'll be happy with 1.0.2 or 1.4.1. They're the stablest versions currently. From what I gather even when 1.5 comes out 1.4.x will be the "stable" releases.

    Firebird is in beta. But why will Firebird "probably always will be?" Firebird development seems to be progressing fast. Why we only got the final release of Mozilla in 2002 and we're already up to Firebird 0.7 in the nightly builds.
  • Reply 19 of 45
    ipodandimacipodandimac Posts: 3,273member
    i'm blown away by safari, but then again i'm on a college campus, and our connections rock... i'm sure safari will be faster with panther
  • Reply 20 of 45
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by ryaxnb

    Mozilla is not a beta. It's in 1.4 stage, quite past beta actually. If you've been using Mozilla 0.9 or 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, iBet you'll be happy with 1.0.2 or 1.4.1. They're the stablest versions currently. From what I gather even when 1.5 comes out 1.4.x will be the "stable" releases.

    Firebird is in beta. But why will Firebird "probably always will be?" Firebird development seems to be progressing fast. Why we only got the final release of Mozilla in 2002 and we're already up to Firebird 0.7 in the nightly builds.



    When I say it "probably always will be" I mean it just seems like there's a tendency for open source projects to never get finished. Maybe I'm totally off with this observation but I haven't seen many open source apps that really feel like full release quality. Even though Mozilla is technically past 1.0 it still feels kind of incomplete. Maybe I'm just missing something but Safari feels much more "done" than Mozilla, even though Mozilla is technically at version 1.5 whereas Safari is just 1.0.
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