This week I’ve been evaluating Chromium, and considering using it as my main browser. Lately I have been using Google Chrome, and have enjoyed the speed and excellent compatibility with Google Gmail and Calendar. But I was curious about Chromium (the Open Source version of Chrome) and it’s claims to be more privacy conscience than Chrome.
Chromium takes a little more work to get set up on Windows than a straight forward install. Due to licensing, certain media files do not play directly in Chromium, as they do in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, so you must use the Chrome codecs. And it doesn’t auto update, you have to look after that manually. But I personally don’t mind having more control over my system. I haven’t completed my personal evaluation yet to decide if I will stay with Chromium, but I decided to publish my benchmark findings between the 4 web browsers I have installed.
I found Chromium to be the fastest, followed close behind by Google Chrome, then Mozilla Firefox in the middle of the pack, with MS Internet Explorer way way behind.
I’ve read that Google Chrome is supposed to be slightly faster than Chromium due to the more aggressive compiling done for public use, but I’ve been using the dev and beta versions of Chrome, so maybe that’s why my findings show Chromium as the leader of these four. Though the Chromium version is the latest daily build, so you would think that it’s also not the most tightly compiled, but I won’t claim to be an expert on which version is compiled better than the next of the two.
Here are the results based on the Peacekeeper benchmark website:
Computer system used:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q6600
GPU: ATI Radeon X1650 Series
Chromium 7.0.527.0
Total Score: 6692
Rendering 4097
Social networking 3400
Complex graphics 14470
Data 15666
DOM operations 5128
Text parsing 12001
Google Chrome 7.0.517.5
Total Score: 6471
Rendering 3818
Social networking 3745
Complex graphics 13024
Data 16132
DOM operations 4704
Text parsing 10465
Firefox 3.6.10
Total Score: 2561
Rendering 2424
Social networking 2416
Complex graphics 4829
Data 3228
DOM operations 2053
Text parsing 2842
IE 8.0.6001.18702
Total Score: 784
Rendering 1152
Social networking 841
Complex graphics 0
Data 690
DOM operations 490
Text parsing 907