Tested: Google Chrome vs Opera vs Safari

We've tested Google Chrome against the latest versions of IE8 and Firefox 3.1 but that hasn't satisfied our curiosity. How does Google Chrome compare with the other two big browsers, Opera and Safari? There was only one way to find out. Time for another browser battle!

Usability

WINNER: OPERA

Safari isn't a bad browser, but on the PC it's not a great one, either. Whether it's arrogance, laziness or a combination of the two, the interface that works so well on the Mac looks completely out of place (the word we'd use is "minging") on XP or Vista, and while the browser itself does the essentials - integrated RSS, good bookmark management, lovely text rendering and an integrated search bar - there's nothing particularly inspiring about it.

Opera, on the other hand, looks brilliant and is a joy to use. It has a proper page zoom rather than the text-only zoom of Safari and Chrome, its address bar gives you the option to Google without using the separate search box, Speed Dial gives you thumbnails of your chosen web pages when you open a new tab, it has decent bookmark management and it's easy to make the interface work the way you want it to.

There's an integrated RSS reader along with email, IRC and BitTorrent, and like Google Chrome, Opera can search the content of your browser history to find forgotten pages. Best of all, there's Mouse Gestures, which enable you to navigate by waving the mouse around, and you can save tab groups to re-open them later. As with Chrome, dragging a tab over the desktop opens it in a new window.

In this department Opera is the clear winner, with Chrome claiming the minimalist crown and Safari sulking in the corner.

Expandability
WINNER: OPERA

As we've already discovered, Chrome isn't expandable beyond a few plug-ins, and it's a similar story with Safari: the few decent add-ons that exist for the Mac version, such as Saft or SafariStand, haven't made it across to Windows.

Things are a bit better with Opera, although there's nothing like Firefox's army of extensions. Instead there are a few available plug-ins such as media players or download accelerators, and you can get extra eye candy in the form of Widgets - which are essentially the same thing as Vista's Sidebar Gadgets. While many of them are fairly pointless, you can still get useful things such as Google PageRank checkers and, er, an aquarium simulator.

Performance
WINNER: CHROME

Chrome is based on Webkit. Safari is based on Webkit. Webkit should deliver the same performance as Webkit - and it does, to a point. That point is JavaScript, and we were surprised by the difference. While Opera and Safari's Sunspider benchmarks were almost indistinguishable, Chrome was significantly faster. We benchmarked on our trusty Core 2 Duo machine, so we'd expect even more dramatic differences on less powerful PCs.

Sunspider benchmarks (lower numbers are better)
Chrome - 1923.0ms
Opera - 4494.8ms
Safari - 4526.6ms

Impressive, eh? It's worth noting that all three browsers outperformed IE8, whose benchmarks hovered around the 7,000ms mark. We had similar results on the second run.

Second Sunspider benchmarks (lower numbers are better)
Chrome - 1980.0ms
Opera - 4762.2ms
Safari - 4440.0ms

Despite its various integrated features, Opera's memory footprint isn't massive. With our selection of ten tabs open simultaneously, it was the least hungry of our browser trio.

Memory Footprint (ten tabs)
Chrome - 141MB
Opera - 113MB
Safari - 163MB

That's not as good as Firefox 3.1 (91MB), but it's much better than IE8 (230MB).

With a single tab open, Chrome was the least greedy - but Opera wasn't far off.