Page load time
Firefox - 8s
Chrome - 11s
IE8 - n/a
From a cold boot Chrome was the fastest to launch, although Firefox was slightly faster to render its first, uncached, page - although quitting the browsers and restarting them erased these differences, with both Chrome and Firefox launching in two to three seconds. We'll come back to IE in a moment.
NB - the benchmark below is a corrected version of the earlier published benchmark. An error in the previously published test showed Chrome outperforming Firefox. TechRadar apologises for the error.
Once again, we ran Sunspider twice, and the gap between Chrome and Firefox was significant.
Test 1
Firefox - 3144.6ms
Chrome - 4283.6ms
IE8 - n/a
Test 2
Firefox - 3332.2ms
Chrome - 3761.0ms
IE8 - n/a
As you can see, on our underpowered PC Firefox performed even better than Chrome. And IE? Where Chrome and Firefox installed simply and quickly, IE decided to waste an entire morning mucking us about. After a lengthy installation procedure we were told that the install had failed, and the Microsoft support site told us to run Windows Update. Which we did - again and again and again. Eventually we gave up in disgust.
So what does this all mean in practice? On a machine that isn't struggling to reach Windows' system requirements we found very little difference between the three browsers, although the variations in memory footprint clearly make a big difference on more modest machines. Remember, though, that these are bare browser installations: start stuffing, say, Firefox with add-ons and its footprint will start expanding accordingly.
Another key consideration is stability. With Firefox, all your open tabs are handled in one go, which means a poorly coded web page or a problem in one tab can bring down the entire browser. With Chrome and IE8, each tab is handled independently. That means a crash in one tab shouldn't affect any other tab - particularly important if you're running web applications for serious work and something silly packs up.
Chrome includes a nifty tab manager (press Shift and Esc to get it) that gives you a view of what each tab's up to, and it enables you to shut down anything that's misbehaving. If you're feeling really geeky, typing "about:memory" in the address bar gives you details not just of the memory being used by each tab, but what kind of memory is being used and what each tab had for breakfast.
Fighting evil
WINNER: IE8. NO, REALLY
Both IE and Chrome have Safari-style private browsing modes, dubbed InPrivate and Incognito respectively. These stop recording your browsing activities so that, ahem, nobody will know about that special present you've been shopping for. Parents will be delighted to discover that Windows' Parental Controls override InPrivate, which will no doubt really annoy teenage boys. With Firefox, private browsing is only via third-party extensions - which is why it loses to IE8 in this category.
It's worth remembering that while InPrivate and Incognito stop sites adding cookies to your system and prevent members of your family from seeing what you've been up to, they don't stop your browser giving away a certain amount of information about you to the sites and search engines you visit. However, while it's tempting to imagine Google using Chrome to secretly spy on you and give the data to its secret army of Terminators, the reality is duller: Chrome doesn't tell Google any more than any other browser does.
All three browsers promise to protect you from net nasties, with anti-phishing warnings popping up automatically. Chrome and IE also use shading in the address bar to show you exactly what domain you're visiting, greying out the bits of the URL that might otherwise obscure the site's origin. It'll be a while before we know how Chrome stacks up on the security front, though, as it's too new for security researchers (and hackers) to have given it a proper poke to look for holes. It's clearly not bulletproof, though: within hours of release, security researcher Aviv Raff found a vulnerability that Chrome has inherited from the Webkit engine it uses.
For many net users, there's another kind of evil to consider: adverts. All three browsers block pop-ups, but that's as far as Chrome goes. Firefox users can install Adblock Plus to get rid of in-page annoyances, while IE8 users can install Adblock Pro. The lack of ad-blocking is enough to rob Chrome of victory here.
TechRadar's final verdict
WINNER: FIREFOX, JUST
None of these browsers is finished, but we've found them stable and useful enough to use as everyday browsers. So which one should be on your machine?
IE8 is the first to fall. It's a vast improvement over IE7 and has some nice touches, but it's too hungry and too slow compared to its rivals (if you can get it to install in the first place. We're still trying to get it onto our laptop). If your machine isn't blessed with lots of RAM and a speedy processor, it's going to annoy you.
The choice between Firefox and Chrome is tougher. For web applications, Chrome is clearly faster - although Firefox's new JavaScript engine isn't far behind it - and its tab management means it should be more stable. Then again there's no ad-blocking, extensions or RSS, and you'll either love or hate its Fisher-Price interface.
For now, we're sticking with Firefox. For all its flaws, it's still the most expandable and customisable of the three, it doesn't look like Baby's First Browser and the ability to block in-page annoyances without having to muck around with proxies more than makes up for the odd crash. Give Chrome extensions, ad-blocking and skins, though, and we may well change our minds.
UPDATE 12.03.09: We've now published a newer version of this article with new browser versions and Safari 4 benchmarks added in.
