Philippine E-Journals

Evaluation of Speed and Memory Usage Performances of Seven Web Browsers

Naomi A. Ubiña

Discipline: Technology

 

Abstract:

Web browsers make use of a graphical interface that enables users to easily access the World Wide Web. Since its development, it became more famous and people started to be more interested in utilizing it. At present, many web browsers can be easily downloaded from the Internet for free. Web users are starting to ask which among these browsers are worth the use. With this, it is important to test which has the best performance in terms of speed and memory usage. The need to personally experience and test the performance of the different browsers brought about the conceptualization of this study. This study evaluated seven different web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, Netscape and Flock) in terms of their performance in start-up loading time and computer memory usage. Three versions of each browser were used. The start-up loading time was measured using two methods: cold and warm start. The computer memory usage was measured using five methods: blank page tab, yahoo page tab, five tabs opened, ten tabs opened and ten tabs opened for 10 minutes.  The results of the experiments show that the browser with the fastest start-up loading time was Google Chrome but had the largest amount of computer memory used. Safari had the lowest amount of memory used for blank tab. The Netscape browser had the lowest memory consumption for one tab and five tabs loaded. Firefox was the best browser for efficient use of memory for ten tabs.