Sent to you by Vihang Shah via Google Reader:
You've already seen how Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer compare in terms of speed, page load, and memory consumption with Kevin's unscientific (but thorough) performance tests. Now the Webmonkey site offers a snippet of JavaScript that lets you speed-test your browser yourself. This bit of code calculates how long the page takes to load and render completely in your browser—so you can use it on different browsers on your own computer, using your own network connection, to get an interesting comparison. We took the Webmonkey code, modified it slightly, hosted it, and now offer up a bookmarklet so you can test any page rendering speed yourself with a click of your toolbar.
Here's our hosted version of Webmonkey's Browser Stopwatch, complete with a bookmarklet:
Browser Load Time Stopwatch >>
Drag and drop the bookmarklet on that page to your toolbar to test the load time of any page you're on, in any browser.
Now, before this gets every web developer's panties in a bunch, let us disclaim: this is not a definitive way to get perfect, unchanging load times and browser benchmarks. In fact, if you run the test on the same site several times you can get wildly different results.
As the authors at Webmonkey point out after they ran the tests on a few pages:
The winner of the Webmonkey.com test is unclear—all browsers fall well within a very loose margin of error. The winner of the Picasaweb.google.com test is pretty clearly Firefox 3. [...] Our tests also vary depending on connection speed, how the browser renders iframes, web server speeds and the amount of elements on the page. We found that the results and margin of error mirror what the end-user sees when they judge for themselves whether the browser is fast.Still, it's fun to see how long it takes pages you frequent to finish drawing themselves and loading other elements in your browser of choice; in some cases, like the tests in which Lifehacker.com clocked in at over 7 seconds, it's more painful than fun. (If you've got any element-blocking extensions like Flashblock installed, chances are things are much speedier for you, too.)
Give the Browser Stopwatch a try in your favorite browsers and tell us how it goes.
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