Adam Olivera reports for Tom’s Hardware, “Chrome 13, Firefox 6, Safari 5.1, and Mac OS X Lion (10.7) have all emerged since our last Web Browser Grand Prix. Today, we test the latest browsers on both major platforms. How do the Mac-based browsers stack up against their Windows 7 counterparts?”
“Version 13 once again earns Google Chrome the Web Browser Grand Prix championship. Chrome’s sheer number of wins nearly discounts its weaknesses,” Olivera reports. “With only one weakness and the highest number of non-winning strong scores, Mozilla Firefox is once again our runner-up.”
“On its native platform, Safari is definitely no slouch. In fact, the performance of Safari 5.1 in OS X Lion matches that of Firefox 6 in Windows 7,” Olivera reports. “Mac OS X Lion is a beauty to behold, and its benefits aren’t just skin-deep. The score for Safari 5.1 on OS X is really close to Chrome 13 running on Windows 7, and it might even beat Firefox 6 for Windows. So, if you throw Safari 5.1 for OS X into the regular Windows 7 mix, Apple takes or shares second place! It appears that your Mac friends were right afterall, so stop hassling them.”
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“Also, remember these tests were not conducted on an actual Apple-branded Mac system. Based on what we saw in the results of WBGP2: Linux, we really didn’t expect the OS X scores to get so close to the best from Windows,” Olivera reports. “With such a slim margin of victory favoring Chrome in Windows (versus Safari on OS X), it is entirely within the realm of possibility that running these tests on a genuine Apple rig could tip the scales in favor of Safari (or back the other way). A more in-depth Hackintosh versus Macintosh comparison would be needed to confirm one way or the other.
Olivera reports, “As it stands, a Mac-based browser matched or beat the best score from Windows-based browsers in 10 out of 29 scored tests. In fact, even on a Hackintosh, Mac OS X is capable of providing better results than Windows 7 in Flash, HTML5, WebGL, and the ever-important page load times. Better standards compliance in Safari and Chrome for Mac even tip conformance in favor of OS X.”
Much more in the full article, including individual benchmarks, here.
MacDailyNews Take: WebKit reigns supreme.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Buck” and “Carl H.” for the heads up.]