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The single most important program on pretty much everyone’s PC these days is the web browser. Indeed, Chromebooks show you can have a useful laptop with only a web browser.
The single most important program on pretty much everyone’s PC these days is the web browser. Indeed, Chromebooks show you can have a useful laptop with only a web browser.
But which Windows 10 web browser is the fastest of them all? I put the most popular Windows 10 browsers to the test.
Here are our contenders in popularity order. First comes Google Chrome 84, with its new popup blocker. Next up is Microsoft Edge 84, which recently switched to using Google’s open-source Chromium web browser. Believe it or not, Internet Explorer (IE) 11 is the next most popular Windows 10 web browser. But even on my last browser benchmarks in 2018, it was the worst of the worst. I took a quick look at it, and I decided between Microsoft getting ready to retire it and its awful performance, I wouldn’t waste time benchmarking it. If you’re still using IE, just stop already. You’ll be better with anything else.
After IE, we have the sadly declining Mozilla Firefox 79. While it’s still an innovation leader, fewer and fewer people are using it. Today, only 3.3% of all web browser users are working with the fox.
Firefox was followed by Opera 68, originally a Norweigan-based browser, which was acquired by a Chinese private-equity company in 2016. Next is Brave 1.11. This open-source browser claimed to do the best job of protecting your privacy. Recently, however, its privacy reputation has taken some dents. Finally, there’s Vivaldi 3.1. This was started by Opera expatriates, who missed the original Opera’s community and look-and-feel. These browsers are all based on Google’s open-source Chromium code.
Yes, that’s right. All these browsers, except Firefox, are essentially, if not twins, very close siblings. You might think that this would mean they’d all have pretty much the same performance. You’d be wrong.
I benchmarked these browsers on my Windows 10 test PC, a Dell XPS 8910. It’s powered by a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-6700 Quad-Core Processor, backed by an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750Ti graphics card with 2GB of graphics memory. This system is running with Windows 10 Home, Version 2004. This older tower PC comes with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB 7,200 RPM hard drive. For networking, the system is connected to a 100Mbps internet connection via a Gigabit Ethernet switch.
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