(For those who don’t like reading just go to the TL;DR version at the bottom of this post)

There’s already been a thread about Google Chrome which can be found here. However, when reading up on Google Chrome much of what I read boasted that it has the fastest JavaScript and Ajax request and processing time. Since Forumwarz uses a lot of Ajax I thought perhaps using the browser might give me an edge on aspects of the game such as speedruns. So I did what any other nerd would do and ran some benchmarks.

The two tests I ran were the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark and the Ajax and Flex Data Loading Benchmark. And was pretty surprised with the results that I got. I could post the boring graphs and printouts of the tests but most people wouldn’t know what they’re reading anyhow.

So just to summarize my research Firefox 3.01 is the second fastest browser I tested. Google Chrome beat Firefox 3.01 on SunSpider by nearly 4000 ms (4 seconds) and about 5 to 6 seconds on each of the Ajax and Flex tests. So now by the statistics I have here are the fastest browers (for Ajax heavy sites) in order:

  
1. Google Chrome (+5s) 
2. Firefox 3.01 (0)
3. Firefox 3.1a1 (-1s)
4. Opera 9.5 (-6s)

I used Firefox 3.01 as the base of my tests and to my surprise on it’s first day Google Chrome out benchmarks anything currently available for Windows. And even more surprising to me on it’s first day the application seems to be fairly stable and uses less memory than any of the other 3 browsers I tested.

However benchmarks are only benchmarks and when it comes right down to it statistics when it comes to browsers never really reflect real world usage. So to further my tests I took both Firefox 3.01 and Google Chrome and actually used most aspects of Forumwarz (battles, sTalk, IDC, etc) to see how noticeable of a difference there was.

Sadly if you’re looking for an edge on speedruns you’re not going to get much help. Despite Google Chromes excellent support of AJAX on the backend it’s support for everything on the frontend is still like WebKit (the Safari rendering engine it is built on). For those who have used Safari on either OS X or Windows may have notice that the animations you see when in battle, opening sTalk and resizing IDC and whatnot are not as smooth as Firefox.

TL;DR version: Google Chrome is a solid browser which it’s speed on several tests prove to be faster that Firefox 3.01 while using less memory. However, when it comes to real world usage they are pretty much on the same level. You’ll likely see no dramatic changes in your speedrun times and those who use a lot of extensions in Firefox will start to miss them right away. It has potential to be great though.