Email conversation
| From | Erik Murphy-Chutorian |
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| To | Me |
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| Subject | regarding browser speeds |
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| Date | 3 November 2005 18:04 |
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I had a quick question regarding browsing speeds. I've been investigating
the ability of a couple Mac browsers to render commercial web pages. From
reading your benchmarks, one would expect that the Opera 8.5 web browser
should render pages faster than Firefox 1.5 or Safari 2.02. Indeed it
appears that Opera renders faster when the page and images are stored on a
local disk, but I find that when the page is browsed on the web, Opera is
MUCH slower than either at displaying the page when it must first download
the images and then display them. An image heavy pages like
"http://www.cnn.com" is a good example. Using a stopwatch, I find that
Firefox and Safari take bout the same amount of time, while Opera 8.5 takes
about twice as long.
I use a cable modem w/wifi connection to conduct this test. Would you be
able to shed some light on the inferior performance of Opera at this task?
-Erik
| From | Me |
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| To | Erik Murphy-Chutorian |
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| Subject | Re: regarding browser speeds |
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| Date | 3 November 2005 18:56 |
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Erik,
> Opera is MUCH slower than either at displaying the page when it must first
> download the images and then display them. An image heavy pages like
> "http://www.cnn.com" is a good example. Using a stopwatch, I find that
> Firefox and Safari take bout the same amount of time, while Opera 8.5 takes
> about twice as long.
Ok, well I just tested this in Opera 9 (the speed of image loading is very
similar to 8.5). It took 11 seconds to load from the moment I pressed enter
to the moment the page was completeu. Firefox took 17 seconds. However,
Opera showed the page almost instantly and then progressively rendered as
more images loaded, so it looked like it took the full 11 seconds to lay it
out. Firefox, however, buffered offscreen for 10 seconds, then displayed an
almost complete page, taking another 7 seconds to complete loading. So it
looked like it took 7 seconds to lay it out, but that was because it took 10
seconds before I could even start reading.
The way that Firefox and Safari work is they wait until they have the
dimensions of all (or most) of the page components before they even begin to
render anything.
Opera's approach means that you can start to read the page earlier, but on
pages with (for example) 400 images with no dimensions, Opera will have to
perform far more reflows than the other browsers. In those cases, Opera will
take a bit longer to render the page. For me (I also have a broadband
connection) Opera is faster on most image based pages, but is about the same
as Firefox on pages like www.vg.no that have a monstrous 250-300 images.
Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/
| From | Erik Murphy-Chutorian |
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| To | Me |
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| Subject | Re: regarding browser speeds |
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| Date | 3 November 2005 20:41 |
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Mark,
You nailed the problem. For sites with lots of images, Opera's reflow
update is slowing down the rendering. In my case, (1.6 GHz G4 and fairly
fast broadband) it only takes 4 seconds for Firefox and Safari to load the
cnn page to completion, while Opera 8.5 and 9 take about 6 seconds. If the
images are stored locally though, Opera is almost instantaneous.
Thanks for the reply,
Erik