Fastest Web Browser, 2011 Edition

Last year on the 16th of July we talked about the fastest Web browser in the wild running Futuremark's Peacekeeper benchmark on Opera 10.60 Chrome 5 and IE 8. Yesterday morning I woke up having this question in my head again - what's the fastest Web browser in March 2011? Nothing easier to do - the free benchmark I mentioned above is still there so I only had to choose some browsers worthy of my attention...

... and yesterday I chose to play with the following: Opera 11.01 Firefox 3.6.13 Chrome 7 LunaScape 6 IE 7/8 Safari 5 and finally Maxthon 3. In case you're wondering about others like Pale Moon Avant Flock GreenBrowser and so on I am sure you also know they use the same rendering engines as IE Firefox or Chrome as their foundation so you can't expect any surprises from them trust me!

To spare you from the effort of staring at some small image with a lot of numbers in it here you have the overall results:

Chrome 7: 5618 Opera 11: 5288 Maxthon 3 (Ultra Mode): 4427 Safari 5: 3681 Firefox 3.6: 2140 Lunascape 6 (Gecko/Trident): 2095/840 IE 7/8: 598/638

Oh yeah I guess there's no big news that I didn't manage to upgrade my PC since this last summer so the setup I used was about the same except my "winter overclocking" allowed by the lower temperatures: AMD X2 4000+ Brisbane CPU@2.5 GHz 2 GB DDR2@840MHz and 4-4-4-11 CR2 latency my good old MSI NEO-F v3 mainboard a single Samsung 1 TB 7200 rpm drive with 32 MB buffer HD 4770 video card with 512 MB GDDR5 memory (anyway the HDD and video card don't really matter but in case you were wondering...) running that Windows XP SP3 Professional most of my friends still use too.

To be sure the results come out as accurate as possible I only had Xion Player Pidgin and the antivirus - Avira AntiVir Personal running while messing with the benchmark. Since this was a pure speed test I ran it with a single window/tab open so results may be slightly different if you launch Peacekeeper in the 30th tab of your browser while 10 sites full of Flash content still load stuff in the background...

For detailed results of each browser's performance see the gallery below. Any comments? ;) [gallery link="file"]