THE BROWSER WARS: Google Chrome vs. Firefox 4 vs. Internet Explorer 9

THE BROWSER WARS: Google Chrome vs. Firefox 4 vs. Internet Explorer 9

The browser wars are heating up again with Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla each with their own, updated browser on offer.

Do how does Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome 10, and Firefox 4 stack up against each other?

CNET's Seth Rosenblatt has run each through a series of tests to assess boot time, memory usage, and performance of both JavaScript and HTML5. (During these tests, all browser extensions and add-ons were disabled.)

Booting speed was measured by clicking the browser's icon and timing how long each took to fully load six websites--talkingpointsmemo.com, aol.com, youtube.com, nytimes.com, giantbomb.com and cnettv.cnet.com. Firefox took home the gold, opening in 17.8 seconds. IE9 was second with 21.86 seconds, and Chrome was third with a boot time of 26.22 seconds.

Rosenblatt then loaded the same six websites and examined each browser's memory usage. Again, Firefox 4 was the champ, utilizing the least amount of memory (148,020 kb) during the test. IE9 followed with 205,616 kb used. Chrome required the most memory (390,532 kb) to complete this task.

"Though the competition is extremely close in some cases--especially JavaScript rendering--Firefox 4 is strongly favored by HTML5 processing, boot time, and memory usage," Rosenblatt concluded. "Overall, I'd judge from these results that Firefox 4 is the winner this time around."

In terms of safety, Chrome and Firefox seem to be the browsers of choice. The two were both unchallenged at this year's PWN2OWN hacking competition, according to ComputerWorld. All three aim to protect the user's identity through secure browsing and anti-tracking options

Internet Explorer has traditionally been ranked the most popular browser. Last week, downloads of the Firefox 4 Release Candidate outstripped downloads for the IE9 RC. Mozilla reported that Firefox 4 was downloaded over 5 million times within its first 24 hours, while Microsoft reported only 2.35 million downloads within the same time frame. Although download figures don't always represent usage figures, Firefox 4 may pose a serious threat to IE9.

See what all the hype is about by checking the new features available in Firefox 4, and compare those to the new features in IE9. To learn more about Chrome 10, read PCWorld's feature breakdown.