Before you start reading this article, feast your eyes on this. It’s the results of a fairly recent series of Windows browser speed and power tests carried out by Life Hacker, in which they pitted all of the top browsers (Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer) against one another in order to determine which one runs the fastest and the best. The results were…surprising, to say the least.

As it turns out, Firefox and Opera now both beat out Google Chrome in terms of overall speed and performance. In other words, Google Chrome isn’t the top dog of the browser world anymore (though Internet Explorer still falls dead last). So…what, if anything, does this mean? Should those of you who are currently using Chrome…stop doing so?

Not exactly. Honestly, it depends on what you use your browser for. If you’re looking to reduce the memory footprint of your internet browsing, then Firefox is definitely the right choice, while Chrome is undoubtedly the biggest memory hog on the list. If you’re looking for near-instantaneous loading of individual web pages, then Chrome’s definitely a good choice, as Google’s Instant Pages feature along with Chrome’s powerful javascript performance mean it’s in no way a slouch in the strength department.  Opera, meanwhile, has a blazingly fast startup compared to all the other browsers.

So….which browser you want to use really does depend entirely on what you want to do with it. If you’re planning on doing a lot of research, and having multiple tabs open at any given point, Firefox’s Tabs on Demand feature will probably be a godsend for you. If you like the idea of being able to run high-performance javascript applications and load single web pages with blazing speed, Chrome’s definitely the way to go. If you simply want your browser to be up and running the moment you’re looking to surf, go with Opera. As for Internet Explorer…

It’s still got a ways to go before it can compete. Sorry, folks…that’s just the way it is.

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