Does browsing speed depend on the browser?

Question

Is browsing speed depends on browser (like IE,firefox)?

If it depends on browser which browser is best and works fast?

And if we clear the cache in browser will it slow down the browsing speed?

thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, it is dependent on the browser. Not just which browser, but also its configuration. There are lots of things which behave differently in different browsers. The same browser may be faster for only a subset of sites. Some factors are:

• Rendering performance
• Javascript performance (including individual methods)
• Caching strategies (which vary a bit)
• Whether HTTP pipelining is enabled by default
• The default maximum number of HTTP connections
• Whether compression etc, is supported
• How soon during page loading the browser chooses to display or layout the page - this can have a big impact on user perception, even if overall load time is the same. Most browsers will make some attempt to render a page before it's finished loading at least some of the time, if it takes more than 1 sec or so.

Sadly there's no standard way of actually deciding that a page has even finished loading - some browsers don't count background images as part of the page load (Mozilla, for instance, fires onload events while background images are still loading).