Re: speed of HTML browsing

wrote:

> which is faster, Firefox or IE7, at rendering html?
>

The question stated in the header doesn't match this one.

HTML rendering speed isn't the same as browsing speed.
HTML rendering speed measures only a very tiny facet of a browser.
Browsing speed depends on many other important factors:
1) Are the HTTP and HTML engines cooperating correctly so that
time(downloading and rendering)=min(time(downloading),time(rendering))?
(This is rarely the case on old computers)
2) To which extent is it progressively rendering?
3) Does the browser reloads page when pressing back?
4) Does loading background page block the foreground page from being
viewed?
5) Are there bookmark nicknames, keyboard shortcuts, session management
and other time-saving features to go to your favorite sites?
6) Is the history well organized to quickly find a site you went to?
7) DOM modification speed, for DHTML sites.
8) Other factors.

From my experience, IE6 is fast at rendering HTML, but slow at browsing
because back/forward don't use the browser cache properly. Moreover,
there's no "tabbed" browsing, so that, using more than one page at a time
is slow because opening a new window has an overhead and because it's
slower to find which page you want in an unorganized mess of windows.
Avant Browser, Maxthon and a few others "IE front ends" have the same
HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and SSL engines than IE. Subjectively
(objective tests tend to give the most biaised results because they test
only very specific facets of the browser), I can say that Avant Browser
with the IE6 engine has a very good browsing speed... Sometimes, it beats
Opera, mainly because it's better than Opera when JavaScript is
disabled(*), at rendering background pages without blocking foreground
pages.
The experience I had with IE7 has been quite bad. However, Avant Browser
with the IE7 engine is fast on a Pentium IV 1.7Ghz with a good connection.
From my experience, faster than FF 2.x.

There's no single "fastest" browser. The fastest browser is the one with
which you're the most productive on your computer with your connection,
measured in amount of work done in one hour. The fastest browser is
different for every user+computer+connection entity.

(*) You see that the browsing speed depends on the browsing style. *I*
disable JavaScript, but very few people do so. It also depends on the
computer speed and connection speed. FF tends to be bad on old computers
with lagging connections.
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