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 took 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.