[Kyrios Zephyrus]

There's also more to a browser than speed.
Chrome may be the flavour of the month right now, but I've read a couple of tests saying it uses an ungodly amount of memory... Firefox has its memory leakage, and it seems Safari takes a lot longer to start up than other browsers. (And yeah, that's pretty much the worst thing I've read about it.)

I don't know... up-to-date information on this seems to be surprisingly scarce, and then of course there's the problem that most of them use special test machines and sometimes even specialised testing software - which is probably not going to mirror the experiences of the end-user.
Yet another problem is that they often test weird combinations of browser versions... for example, one test was using Opera 9.63... despite the fact that the most recent stable version is 9.64, and the 10.00 beta had been available for quite a while, even at that time in the past.
Yet, they had no problem with using the most recent Firefox 3.5 beta in the same test.
Anyway, most people ignore those tests because they think they're "wrong", not being able to get their biased heads around the fact that Internet Explorer 8 is actually quite fast.

I think I might download a few more browsers myself and compare their performance first-hand on my underpowered system.
You see, even if I had a more powerful computer, a browser that commandeers vast quantities of system resources is not a winner in my book. I often need to keep my browser open long-term for some reason, and I need to be able to do other things while it's open...
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that some of these much-vaunted "superspeed" browsers aren't so hot when starved of their precious 2GB memory banks and 2.6GHz CPUs.
A web browser should NOT be a resource-hungry application, because pretty much everyone who has a computer will need one - even the people with "old" computers.
There are people out there still using Windows 98, ffs. Just what do you think would happen if one of those guys tried running Firefox? (Actually, nothing, 'cause it would refuse to even start up. But if it did run, it would not be a pretty sight...)

Incidentally, Opera is the only browser that still works on Win95/98 with its current release... other than some thing that was discontinued years ago. It's also the one that uses the least memory by far (that isn't Firefox, which starts out light but doesn't stay that way), which may account for its superior speed on my 512MB system.
So maybe Opera isn't the fastest browser, but it very much seems to be the most efficient.

[Konradz]

Well, I tried running a bunch of tests myself, using what I found on the Net. I'm sorry, I completely forgot to do it with IE :/ I have indeed heard though, that the latest version is much, much better than before.
I ran these "tests" using Windows XP (PC section of my iMac)

Sunspider Javascript Benchmark
Chrome : 942.0ms
Safari : 870.0ms
Firefox : 1495.8ms

Acid3 (tests HTML4, XHTML, CSS, SVG, DOM, HTTP) :
Chrome : 100/100 or 96/100 ; however, the page says "LINKTEXT FAILED". I don't exactly know what this means, I just know that it's not normal and that Chrome didn't fully pass the test : the 5th square (blue) is greyed out.
Safari : 100/100
Firefox : 91/100 (5th square greyed out)



CSS rendering benchmark ; tested 3 times for each browser (using the method given here : http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html)
Firefox : 229 / 242 / 246
Chrome : 67 / 62 / 62
Safari : 36 / 37 / 35

This website also gives results of a Javascript speed test, where Safari outruns Chrome (2x) and Firefox (2x)

I hope that helps. To me it shows that Safari is a very fast browser (at least when it comes to the things tested), pretty much as efficient as Chrome, both quite better than Firefox . I should have tried this with IE, especially after what Master_Z has been saying, but I completely forgot... Too bad though, would have been much more interesting than these results. Sorry :/

[Kyrios Zephyrus]

Interesting.

Here's the results I got from those tests (1.6GHz, 512MB RAM, WinXP Professional SP2):

Sunspider

Opera 9.64: 7166.4ms
Internet Explorer 8.0: 8696.4ms

(Assuming the "total" value, of course. I also tested this with my CPU speed turned down, and it made a pretty big speed decrease. Therefore, this one could only realistically be used to compare browsers on the same machine.)


Acid3

Opera 9.64: 85/100
Internet Explorer 8.0: 20/100

(I've read that Opera 10.00b gets 100/100, but fails. I don't intend to upgrade to Opera 10 until the stable release. IE's result may be bad, but IE7 only got 4/100 or something.)


CSS

Opera 9.64: 230/231/230
Internet Explorer 8.0: 591/600/591

(Um, what about the link which says that Safari and Chrome don't time the test properly? 36 milliseconds to render 2500 <div>s seems kind of fishy to me.)


I see no JavaScript test details on the page you linked (which I also saw, and disregarded because of its age) other than a link to an expired domain.

I also tested IE8 with addons switched off (though I don't have any that I'm aware of), and it was actually slightly slower in those tests, though not enough to be significant.

[Konradz]

Well, it said that Chrome and Safari should actually do it more slowly, so I didn't take it into account.

On http://celtickane.com/labs/web-brows...pt-benchmark/? You can find the thing he was using at the bottom of the page before the comments, and his results dated July 10th 2009

[icesta1]

I prefer Firefox lol

[lo0psyn]

I've been using firefox for a long time now and it's pretty much fantastic. The sheer amount of add ons and all the customization that you can do with it is amazing.

[sakura-sachik]

Mozilla because that is what my brother has installed in the pc

[Exian]

Firefox just owns everything. It's like the Microsoft under the browsers.
Firefox has tons of add-ons and lot's of customization options.
Firefox is just the browser for me. xD

I've been using it for ages now and I don't intend to stop. ^^

[Anime Feak]

I use Firefox 3 with a cool theme

[BakaFishy]

Definitely Firefox!!