Paijem Buzz

Today I want to compare 3 browsers’ performance when opening Google Mail. They are Flock, Firefox, and Opera.

Google Mail (or GMail) is a free email from Google. It has 2 modes, Standard View with heavy loaded AJAX, and Basic HTML View without AJAX for browser without Javascript capabilities (maybe determined from Browser’s User Agent). GMail also has another address : gmail.com.

Features are :

• POP, SMTP, IMAP.
• Retrieve Email from other email accounts using POP.
• Multi labels for each incoming email.
• Filters for incoming emails.
• Use only 1 GMail account to send and receive from/to many email accounts.
• Relevant RSS Feed, you can customize it.
• Relevant text ads while reading emails.
• Give “Star” for important emails.
• etc…

But unfortunately, all those features sometimes make GMail very heavy. So I have tested using 3 famous browsers.

With Condition :

Operating System	Windows XP Professional SP3
Processor	Intel Pentium III 600 MHz
Memory	256 MB
Flock version	1.1.4
Firefox version	2.0.0.14
Opera version	9.50.9624
Site Measured	Google Mail, standard view (with chat enabled) and basic HTML view
Parameters	CPU and Memory Usage. Counted after finished loading.
Other Parameters	Loading Speed
How ?	1 browser at a time with only 1 site opened.
Program to view the performances	Task Manager
Anything else ?	I’m sorry if I didn’t include any version of IE here

And the results :

Browser	Mode	CPU (%)	Memory (KBytes)	Loading Speed
Flock	Standard View	96	61.364	Fastest
	Basic HTML	0	51.892
Firefox	Standard View	80	44.728	Good
	Basic HTML	1	32.844
Opera	Standard View	17	47.560	Slow
	Basic HTML	0	46.212

Conclusion

If you want to use AJAX based GMail (Standard View), you need to have a good processor. If your processor is old (like mine), you better use Basic HTML View.

What about the choice of browsers ? I’m using flock because it’s the best browser to manage all my blogs and social networking sites. But using flock to open GMail is not a good idea for me. I only open GMail with flock only when I don’t want to surf other websites.

Opera ? It only requires small CPU and Memory Usage. But its speed is very terrible (and annoying). So usually I open GMail using Firefox, better than Flock on CPU and Memory Usage, but a little bit slower than Flock.

If you find out anything else, please tell me via comments.

Thank You.

Tags: browser, firefox, flock, google, opera

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 3:43 am and is filed under opinions, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.