What Web Browser is Fastest for Windows in 2011?

Acid Tests, HTML5 Compatibility & Conclusion

In the past we have never really looked at web standards on browsers, so we thought we’d give it a shot this time around. The Web Standards Project has a series of tests called the Acid Tests that are very popular. The most recent version is Acid3, which runs a web test page from the Web Standards Project that checks the performance of a web browser regarding the issue of following certain selected elements from web standards, especially relating to the Document Object Model (DOM) and JavaScript. Benchmarks like WebKit SunSpider 0.9.1 don’t include any DOM tests, so this should be interesting. To pass the test, a browser must use its default settings, the animation rendered has to be smooth and the score has to end on 100/100.

At the end of this test only Safari 5.0.5, Chrome 10, Chrome 11, Opera 11.10 and Opera 11.50 were able to get perfect scores on the Acid3 test and render the operation smoothly. It should be noted that Firefox and SeaMonkey scored 97 and that the 3 points missed are for SVG Fonts, which Mozilla says aren’t needed. You can read more about it here.

The final test that we wanted to look at was one that looked at how well each browser does to support HTML5. For this we ran ‘The HTML5 Test‘ and took the score from each browser. The test looks at 400 HTML5 features and sees how many the browser supports.

Google Chrome 11.0.696.65 came out on top here with Google Chrome 12 beta only missing a couple features, which is typical on a beta as they are still adjusting code and enabling features until it becomes a stable build and released to the masses. Opera 11.10 and 11.50 Alpha had very strong test results in the HTML5 test as did FireFox 4.0.1 and 5.0 Beta.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions:

We hope this testing helped you out and helped you learn or discover something you didn’t know about web browsers before reading this. Our testing shows that in all of the benchmarks except for one that the fastest Microsoft Windows
based
browser is once again Google Chrome. Chrome 11 is the fastest public web browser and Chrome 12 is the fastest beta web
browser that you can download today to use today. Firefox 5.0 beta 1 was also pretty darn fast and had very good test results across all benchmarks and compatibility tests that we ran. You really can’t go wrong with either and as with everything it really depends on what you like. If you’ve never tried one of these browsers before we suggest downloading the one you’ve never tried and see if you like it.

Legit Bottom Line: After testing 15 browsers Google’s Chrome 12.0 Beta proved to be the quickest for script heavy web
sites