Testing rig:
- Device: Nokia N900 @ 600 Mhz (default)
- Firmware: PR1.2 (Leaked)
- Condition: Just reflashed

- Device is rebooted before switching browser.
- Cache is deleted between every test.
- Flash is disabled.
- Every site is loaded twice and result is the average of these.
- This test will be updated once in a while.

Version Number:
Fennec: 2.0~a1~20100509010641 (Nightly)
Opera Mobile: 10alpha~fremantle0

Browsermark (http://ra.fi/hJ5z):
Please post your own results in this thread. So we can get more comprehensive results.

Higher is better.

MicroB: 14994
Opera Mobile: 15363 (alpha1-3) [s]11015[/s] (alpha1-0)
Fennec: No result, crashes every time.

Page loading:
In seconds. Lower is better.

http://facebook.com (no mobile)
MicroB: 4,99
Fennec: 3,66
Fennec Jit: 3,87
Opera Mobile: 2,33

http://maemo.org
MicroB: 7,24
Fennec: 4,65
Fennec Jit: 4,40
Opera Mobile: 3,66

http://talk.maemo.org
MicroB: 10,49
Fennec: 5,74
Fennec Jit: 5,68
Opera Mobile: 9,72

http://www.nokia.com
MicroB: 5,66
Fennec: 6,02
Fennec Jit: 4,30
Opera Mobile: 5,03

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
MicroB: 14,40
Fennec: 6,08
Fennec Jit: 5,89
Opera Mobile: 9,20

http://www.youtube.com (no mobile)
MicroB: 14,05
Fennec: 6,62
Fennec Jit: 8,21
Opera Mobile: 10,02

http://www.nytimes.com
MicroB: 27,23
Fennec: 20,13 (two crashes, then success)
Fennec Jit: 26,11
Opera Mobile: 21,20

Average:
In seconds. Lower is better.
Fennec: 7,56
Fennec Jit: 8,35
Opera Mobile: 8,74
MicroB: 12,01

...but with Opera Mobile you can load the next page of a site much faster than in any other browser. Good caching?

In seconds. Lower is better.


Startup:
In seconds. Lower is better.

MicroB: Instant
Opera Mobile: 2.934
Fennec: 5.978

Stability:

In my test Fennec crashed three times so that I had to boot whole device. Even killall in xterm didn't help.

In general use I have found that Fennec (nightly) is not stable enough compared to the other two. I have used "stable" version earlier but found that same problems were there. Large sites cause crashes quite often. Opera is newest browser, so it's hard to say anything about stability. Though still I haven't had any problems. MicroB has always been quite stable.

Usability and speed in general:

For me the UI of Opera is easily the best of these browsers. It leaves behind Fennec which I earlier loved. MicroB is far away from both of these browsers.

Though Fennec nailed these tests in paper I have to say that for me Opera Mobile is the fastest browser. I didn't test this but seems that Opera's caching works better than in other browser. Opera loads first page in a site little slower than Fennec but next page can open in a flash. For example, using Google-search made my eyes pop out. It's so fast!

Rendering:

There are minor and major problems with Opera Mobile (for example Gmail, Youtube). Fonts also differ from other browsers.

Conclusion:

It's obvious that in this test Fennec is the fastest browser for Nokia N900 in numbers. Bad performance of MicroB came as a surprise for me.

Newcomer Opera Mobile does it job very good for such an early version. Startup speed is fast and general browsing maybe fastest. UI is slick and beautiful.

This test made me switch from MicroB to Opera Mobile as my default browser.

Where can I get the Opera Mini for N900?

*Mobile. My bad. Thanks for noticing.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...214#post653214

Is it just me or does Fennec use cpu more intensely than microb. As battery life is already way too short for me I fear that fennec will shorten it even more

Cheers. It'd be useful if you indicated what the numbers meant (seconds, other metrics) and whether lower or higher is better.

Also, when you say Opera Mini, do you really mean Opera Mini or do you mean Opera Mobile? Both run on the N900 but Opera Mobile would be the most relevant to test as it's the only one that has a Maemo version that can be installed by end-users without having to rely on hacks.

EDIT: just saw your reply above - so it's Opera Mobile 10 you've tested then.

The new Opera Mobile 10 browser for Maemo is available from: http://labs.opera.com/news/2010/05/11/

Thanks for the good work, I'm quite surprised as well, and even with supposed PR(L)1.2 speed bump, micro-B came in last.

A few questions though,
How did you calculate the load time of the pages?

If you'd like to make a compete benchmark I think that loading these pages with the cache persisting may how some interesting results as well for oft visited pages.

Thanks for the tips.

Yeah, it was my error.

I loaded every page twice (cache empty) and calculated the time with stopwatch. I stopped the stopwatch instant when the page was done with loading.

I could make the benchmark more comprehensive by also timing when the page is drawed though not finished loading. And cache tests also would be a great addition.

For me, the speed of the 'back' button wins it for Opera Mini. very necessary when using bloglines.

On PR 1.1, MicroB is installed on the rootfs, which is faster than the larger file system where Fennec and Opera Mobile are installed. MicroB is also (partially) preloaded into memory, even when not open. I haven't looked at PR 1.2, so I don't know if any of this has changed.

Of course, I'm one of the guys doing the Opera port, so I'm obviously biased towards making Opera look better than the other browsers.