Apple’s Safari browser beats rivals on speed

Web Performance Inc, a US-based testing firm, claims that Apple’s Safari browser was faster than rival browsers from Microsoft and Mozilla in tests.

Web Performance measured how quickly the Windows versions of Apple’s Safari, Microsoft Corp’s Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Mozilla Corp’s Firefox 2 grabbed pages.

The company pointed each browser at the 16 most-visited sites, according to Alexa, at the end of August 2007, and measured how long it took each to render each site recorded.

Multiple tests were carried out over a two-day period and the results were averaged to produce a final number.

Web Performance also measured how long it took each browser to pull up html on a local server, in order to eliminate differences caused by varying Web server loads and Internet traffic conditions.

The Safari 3 Windows beta proved to be the fastest browser in terms of page load time in all tests.

However, the differences between Safari and IE, and Safari and Firefox, were minimal when the site was pulled from the local cache, rather than the actual server.

When the browsers were pulling up a page for the first time, Safari was on average 1.1 seconds faster than IE 7, and 1.4 seconds faster than Firefox.

The tests support Apple’s claim that the Safari 3 beta is the fastest browser currently available on the web.

However, Safari was found to be 1.4 times faster than Internet Explorer at loading pages, not twice as fast as Apple claimed at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Apple is expected to release Safari 3 for Mac OS X on Friday, as part of its new ‘Leopard’ operating system.

Safari 3 can be downloaded free of charge from the Apple site.