It’s early in the honeymoon phase with Firefox 3 or more accurately infatuation “I just met you” phase, but FF3 appears as fast (or faster) than both Safari and Camino.ย That’s fast.ย Ridiculously fast when you consider that it has the power of the largest Add-Ons base, plus the best overall standards support of any web browser.
I performed a quick pseudo-scientific speed test among Camino 1.6.1, Firefox 3, and Safari 3.04, emptying caches and restarting each browser before loading the test site for each run and here are the results:
TripAdvisor.com
- Firefox 3 – 4.09 seconds
- Camino – 4.29 seconds
- Safari – 4.33 seconds
Cnn.com
- Firefox 3 – 4.98 seconds
- Safari – 5.15 seconds
- Camino – 5.3 seconds
Gmail.com
- Safari – 3.82 seconds
- Camino – 4.67 seconds
- Firefox 3 – 4.60 seconds
These are load times of the following home pages for my location (France), and my account, where applicable (i.e. Gmail).ย The timer was stopped when the loading bar disappeared from the browsers.
Interestingly, Safari is still consistently fastest for Gmail.
The single biggest reason for my switching to Camino from Firefox was Firefox 2’s abysmal speed.ย The other nice features of Camino included Flashblock/adblock, inline search+navigation (forward slash key, start typing, if inline search result is a link then hit enter to open the link), are now fully integrated into Firefox 3… plus FF3 is slightly faster.ย I think this could spell the end of Camino for me… (for now).
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