The past few weeks has brought us major updates from the big three Internet Browsers – Google Chrome 10, Firerfox 4, and Internet Explorer 9 – and the verdict’s in regarding speed, and safety.
Many companies have yet to break out from the old IE paradigm. However, recent tests conducted at CNET reveal that IE may no longer be a “best practice.” The tests examined three important browser characteristics: boot time, memory usage, and comparing performance of JavaScript and HTML5 processing. Finally, CNET reflected on this year’s hacking competition, held March 16-20, in Vancouver.
“Each browser’s booting speed was measured by clicking the browser’s icon and timing how long each took to fully load six websites – talkingpoints.com, aol.com, youtube.com, nytimes.com, giantbomb.com, and cnettv.cnet.com,” reported CNET. Firefox won, loading with a mean time of 17.8 sec. A full 4 and 9 seconds faster than IE and Chrome, respectively.
Firefox also uses less memory than its competitors. Loading the same six websites, Firefox utilized almost a third less memory than IE, and almost 65% less memory than Chrome. Firefox also was strongly favored during the HTML5 processing test.
In a surprising turn of events, Internet Explorer finished dead last in terms of safety. According to Computer World, Firefox and Chrome “went unchallenged at this year’s hacking competition.”
It’s important to keep your company’s browsers updated. Not just because older browsers are more and more unable to render many types of web pages in the manner that they were intended, but because in doing so, your company can operate faster, and safer.