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Odds are you spend a good chunk of your day inside a web browser but which one is fastest?
To test we’ve got a midrange PC running the Windows 10 Technical Preview and a 2013
11 inch MacBook Air, both of which are outfitted with SSDs to keep things fair. The reason
we’re using Windows 10 is Project Spartan. This is an all new browser Microsoft will
be including in Windows 10 to replace Internet Explorer. There’s a very early version of
this included in the Technical Preview which you can access by going to about:flags in
IE 11 and turning on the experimental features. This should give us a pretty decent look at
how Spartan will match up once Windows 10 comes out. The first test we’ve got is Peacekeeper
which is a good general test of how a browser performs. On Windows it’s surprisingly close
between Firefox, Chrome and Opera. You can see Spartan slightly improves from Internet
Explorer but it still trails quite a bit behind. Over on the Mac side things are still close
but here Firefox pulls a bit more of a lead. Next we’ve got Octane which is all about
testing the Javascript speed of the browsers. Here Chrome and Opera pull out the win which
makes sense as they share a lot of DNA however the big surprise is Spartan, it’s a massive
improvement over Internet Explorer. On Yosemite it’s basically the same story, Chrome is
the performance champ with Firefox and Safari trailing behind. Now let’s take a look at
the HTML5 test to see which browser supports the most HTML features. Again Chrome and Opera
pull out the win here followed by Firefox and Safari. Spartan improves only slightly
but this of course is still a very early version. Browserscope is a simple test that checks
how many common web threats your browser can block. And surprise, surprise, Chrome and
Opera do well here but the really interesting thing is the fairly poor performance of Safari
and especially Firefox. A new test this time around is the Unity WebGL benchmark. This
is all about checking out the gaming performance in some of the latest browser based games.
The benchmark didn’t behave very well in Windows but on Mac it’s obvious that Firefox
is the way to go for WebGL content with the rest falling quite a ways behind. Next I tested
how long it takes to start each browser and then load the Google homepage. Here we see
Project Spartan pull out a huge win by loading in just over a half second, beating out even
Internet Explorer thanks to being built-in to Windows. On Mac it’s still quite a bit
closer with Chrome edging out the win but there’s still less than a one second difference
between all four. To see how well each of the browsers will run on older computers I
loaded up eight popular websites and measured how much memory they each use. On Windows
Firefox is impressively lightweight, needing quite a bit less RAM than the rest of the
field. Spartan also does a good job, improving quite a bit over Internet Explorer. On Mac
Safari pulls out a slight win where Opera falls quite a bit behind. While it’s hard
to go wrong with browsers these days Chrome is still the most solid choice for both Windows
and Mac. So what browser are you guys using? Let me know in the comments below and if you
want to catch more videos like this be sure to subscribe to the channel! Anyway guys,
thank you so much for watching and I will catch you in the next one.