Gran Paradiso rocks the web

Firefox 3 codename Gran Paradiso will most likely leave alpha phase in September. The release of Gran Paradiso alpha 7 could be the last alpha version and I decided to take a look and see what we can expect in the new version. The first thing that I noticed when starting the new Firefox release was the incredible speed.

I decided to throw some speed tests towards Firefox 2.0.0.6, Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9.22 and Firefox Gran Paradiso Alpha 7 since this was more of a feeling than a proof that Firefox 3 - despite being an alpha version - is the fastest browser nowadays.

The webwait website was exactly what I needed. You can enter a url on that site and define how many times you would like to load that time. Webwait is then calculating the average speed that it takes to access that website. The first time is always higher of course because the other tries use the cache to speed up the loading time.

I tested all four browsers against the following urls: Google, Digg and Cnn and here are the results:

Internet Explorer 7

• Google: 0.33s
• Digg: 5.11s
• Cnn: Error

Opera 9.22

• Google: 0.40s
• Digg: 3.77s
• Cnn: 4.40

Firefox 2.0.0.6

• Google: 0.23s
• Digg: 2.63s
• Cnn: 2.77s

Firefox 3 Gran Paradiso

• Google: 0.20s
• Digg: 2.36s
• Cnn: 1.52s

Gran Paradiso rocks the web. The results are really astonishing. It beats all other browsers and is especially faster when loading complex sites it seems. I really can't wait for the first beta version to arrive.

It needs to be noted that we are still talking about an alpha version and that improvements are likely going to be made before the final version gets released by Mozilla.

Note that the results are everything but scientific so that they should be taken with a grain of salt. It is necessary to run the final version of the browser through some benchmarks to find out more about its performance and the comparison with other browsers.

Update: You can download the latest version of Firefox from the Mozilla website.

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