Andrei

Because Avant is just Internet Explorer with a fancy skin, it does not
include its own rendering engine, it just uses whatever is already
installed on the system. So for Avant, like Maxathon, the performance
should approximate to the Internet Explorer performance for whatever
version of Internet Explorer is installed on the computer. The tabbed
browsing may mean a slight increase in script performance (popups may be
faster), but this difference will not be very significant. The same goes
for any other Internet Explorer clones. 

If I had included this as a separate browser, I would also have felt
obliged to include all the other clones of this and Mozilla - and there are
far too many of them.


Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/

> 1. You could test first just the IE clones. They are Windows only and there
> aren't really that many of them (at least, I only know these 2).

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/tutorials/javascript/dhtml
And my records are out of date ... (neither Maxathon or Avant are listed,
for example - I will change that once my FTP access resumes)

Besides, I would say that AOL is far more popular than either of these, and
it also uses IE. I do not have access to AOL at all (and I wouldn't touch
it, even if I did have access).

The other problem is that they will also rely on the underlying IE, so it
would make a big difference whether IE 6 or IE 5 was installed underneath,
and for a complete test I would need to test with both of these installed
(which I cannot do).

OK, to be fair (since I did test epiphany), I will test these two - not
because I want to though. But it will allow people to determine what their
alternative skin will perform like.

> 2. I understand that the Mozilla clones may be too many

yup:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/tutorials/javascript/dhtml

> you could use an objective criterion for inclusion

Nope. I will simply not include any more. I have included a couple of
clones (Mozilla, Firefox, Chamino, K-Meleon), and an interface skin
(Epiphany). People who use others can base their time on those. The
criterion for inclusion was: either an official distribution from the
vendor, or the default browser of a DTE. The only reason I included
K-Meleon was because people were telling me it was faster and I wanted to
shut them up ;)

> 3. Your claim of testing all the browsers would be far more impactful,
> once you include the periphery.

I do not claim to have tested all browsers, or even anything like it. I
test all the main ones, and allow people to draw their own conclusions for
any varient they are using.

> I've been using Opera since version 5.x

Same here. My preferred browser.

> The only problem is that sometimes, when I have multiple tabs open,
> it starts to slow down and expand the virtual memory for no apparent
> reason. The disk keeps on churning, almost bringing the system to a halt.

Never seen that happen. My disk starts chugging a bit as a Java applet
starts, but that's about it. Asked anyone on the forums about it?
http://my.opera.com/forums/