I'm often asked which is the best Mac browser to use. My answer is always the same: It's the one that you like the best. Many individuals want a more quantifiable answer, though, so to see if we can put some measurements behind browser performance, we decided to perform a Mac browser benchmark test.
Browser Shootout 2010: Which Mac Browser Is the Best?
As the name implies, this shootout will be repeated at least once a year, perhaps more often, as browsers evolve or new browser developers enter the market.
The first decision I faced in putting together this Mac browser benchmark was which browsers to include. So, I turned to About: Mac readers, and the browsers you use to visit the site. The most often used browsers are Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. But this test isn't about which browsers are the most popular, but which are the best, at least in terms of benchmark tests. So, I added seven more Mac browsers to the list, to round out the shootout to an even 10 participants.
Here are the Mac browser shootout contestants for the fall of 2010:
- Camino 2.0.4
- Chrome 6.0.472.63
- Firefox 3.6.10
- Flock 2.6.1 (no longer available)
- iCab 4.8
- OmniWeb 5.10.1
- Opera 10.63
- Safari 5.0.2
- SeaMonkey 2.0.8
- Stainless 0.7.5
Who's Who?
Almost all of the browsers in our test are based on one of two underlying architectures: Mozilla's Gecko browser engine, which powers Firefox, and WebKit, which Apple originally created to power Safari. WebKit started life as a fork of KHTML, the browser engine used in the Konqueror web browser found in many Linux distributions. WebKit, like Gecko, is an open source project, which is one reason these engines are used as the base for many browser projects.
The Gecko-based browsers in our test are:
Firefox, Camino, Flock, SeaMonkey
The WebKit-based browsers in our test are:
Safari, Chrome, Stainless, iCab, Omniweb
That leaves Opera, which uses Presto, its own layout engine.
Because only three different underlying technologies run our ten browsers, you might expect to see similar browser performance within groups. However, just because browsers use the same base engine doesn't mean they will test the same. Browser developers have their own goals for what they think are key areas that need improvement, and browsers may use different versions of the same underlying browser engine.
