The TechRadar site decided to settle the matter of media player performance in definitive fashion, loading up a few test files in different formats in 16 different media players, including Lifehacker favourites VLC Media Player, Media Player Classic and Windows Media Player, the built-in app we’ve recently learned to love. The results?
This morning Apple surprised everyone by approving the Opera Mini web browser for the iPhone and iPod touch, bringing one of the most popular mobile browsers to the most popular smartphone. So how does it stack up?
Flash has taken quite a beating lately by everyone from Apple (no Flash on iPad or iPhones) to YouTube (transitioning to HTML5 video) to users sick of security exploits and sluggish browsers. Everyone’s looking for the silver bullet that kills Flash, but is HTML5 it?
Firefox 3.6 Beta 1, like every other browser, makes a claim to being “faster”. We took Firefox and all the other latest browsers, put them on Windows 7, and ran them through our human-measured speed tests to vet the bragging.
Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer all reached new final versions recently, while Firefox and Opera pushed their own web browsers into almost-there betas. We pulled out the digital stopwatch and testing kits to see how they measured up.
Back when Firefox 3′s final release candidate dropped, we ran some tests to compare its page-loading, memory use, and technical timing to Internet Explorer 7, Opera, and Safari for Windows. Then Google Chrome arrived, so we pitted it against the betas for Firefox 3.1 and Internet Explorer 8, and shared the results. The tests were by and large the same, but many commenters wisely asked to see all the results, betas or no betas. Well, today we’ve patched together all our data, thrown in a fresh test of the Opera 9.6 beta, and we’re sharing all the graphy goodness. Read on to see a full comparison of the major browsers you can load on Windows.