The pace of browser development has increased a lot since the days way back when Microsoft said IE6 was going to be their last browser.  Things have really changed, although bizarrely  there are still some organisations using IE6 as they are dependent on some of it's unique quirks, that bespoke Intranet sites won't work without.

Google Chrome has picked up market share very quickly from a standing start this last year or so - not least due to it's excellent JavaScript speed which is quite popular among web testers: the less time per page the better, whether you are doing an initial survey across a web site to plan and design User Journeys for load testing: or whether you're investigating problems that your web monitoring service has just alerted you to.

It is also nice and robust when working with a site still being built: bugs in the  JavaScript in a page will only crash one tab in Chrome not the whole browser, due to it's one thread per tab design.

Chrome 6 development started in May 2010, so the fast pace of Google's work on chrome continues.

Meanwhile Firefox 4 is now out in beta.

Firefox has for a long time been the web developers and web testers browser of choice: back to the days when it was so easy to add very powerful add-ons into Firefox, add-ons that make it easy to debug page designs and problems:  it's no longer the new kid on the block but the original Web Developer Toolbar was hugely popular: and more recently the Firebugs of this world.

Speed-wise, Firefox 4 is reputed to be nearly 30% faster at JavaScript rendering than Firefox 3.7 the current stable release.

Hardware acceleration in browsers is now coming along.  Interesting how a few years back, Internet experience was not impacted by browser speed, it was all down to the modem bottleneck.  Now RIA and complex web applications mean that browsers do need to be slick.  RIA testing shows it.

For overall performance, Firefox 3.7 and IE9 beta both can use hardware acceleration and  both are very fast when enabled:  faster overall than Chrome despite it's JavaScript performance.

As far as doing a quick comparison of site confidence the SciVisum web test team here are split between Firefox users and Chrome users, with strongly expressed loyalties on both sides it seems!  Various comparisons and reviews and supplier benchmarks referred to support both sides!

Of course for some parts of testing where you really want to do what the customer does you are forced to use the slow IE8 as it's so widely used out there. C'est la vie.

Have you got a web browser based monitoring supplier who can make the User Journey comparisons you need to maximise online user experience?

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