The Speed to Browse

One of the most frustrating things to do in life is wait. They say patience is a virtue, but I have a cliche of my own: why wait? Your web browser, as one of the most important applications of a computer shouldn't keep you waiting too long. After studying all of the web browsers that I saw available on the market the one thing I did not take into account was the load up times of browsers. Google Chrome loads up really fast. My Flock browser, not so much. Instead of going by the overall vibe, I decided to take out my iPod Touch's trusty stopwatch feature and load each browser up individually to find out how long each one takes. To make things fair since I haven't used some of these browsers since I wrote the article, I have loaded each of them up to get them refreshed. For each individual start up, I shall restart my computer to give it time to get the juices flowing. Also to keep things fair I made the start up page for all browsers iGoogle and I counted a start up as a browser is open and I can start to use it. Let's see how this goes:

Apple Safari: 1:01.7
Mozilla Firefox: 46.4
Flock: 40.2
Opera: 36.6
Google Chrome: 29.1
Microsoft Internet Explorer: 27.3
AOL Explorer: 10.3

To say that I was shocked by AOL Explorer is a gross understatement. I swore Chrome would run away with this. To be fair I use Flock and Firefox a little bit more than most, so I have more add-ons loaded into them. Microsoft IE also has a good amount of add-ons but it still loaded up very quickly. Safari and Opera opened the browser window very quickly but it took a ton of time for the actual web page to become available.

I almost feel guilty being so rough on AOL Explorer when I reviewed it before. Sometimes when I need to check out a web page quick, I would open Google Chrome while I'm waiting for Flock to open. Now I'll be giving Explorer more of that opportunity. 10.3 seconds is great. Maybe AOL should make a music player so I don't have to wait 5 minutes for Itunes to load up anymore.