You will also have to test each browser at the same time of day to get a fair comparison. Broadband speed will vary day-to-day and hour-to hour, depending on the volume of internet traffic

Reality
 

There is no single Fastest and Most Compatible browser, even on the PC side of the fenz:) though because it is a more monoplistic:) its usually IE6 or nothing :eek: :eek:

Most Sites tend to code for IE5 to IE6 PC first.... That said designers, design and then test. Good sites, IMHO test with all the major Browsers and versions on multiple platforms (PC, MAC, Linux, Unix etc.).

Problem is too many varibles for perfection, and too much desire to have Cool websites. One has to balance LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) aginst the look/functions you want.

----------------
In a word or two:) On OSX their is not one browser that will work 100 percent for every site and be the fastest too.

Safari is most folks current fav, but people use Netscape, Mozilla, firefox, Camino, Opera etc, etc. for various reasons.

I personally start with Safari but have to switch to other browsers for some sites and vs. versa.

You can go to Google and see browser use percentages by type and version to see what designers deal with.

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
Safari uses KHTML but is not broken out in the stats...

And, very unfortunately, the "various reasons" include that a number of secure sites will only function in IE. These include my online banking site, and although Webex will work on a Mac, it will only function properly in IE, to name only two. So, alas, I have IE installed even though I'm a committed Safari user on my Mac, and although I prefer Firefox on my Windows XP laptop (job requirement, not choice), I must have IE there too if for no other reasons that XP updates are integrated with it.

Camino / Safari - Fastest Mac Browsers
 

If you're looking for pure unadulterated speed in a Mac web browser, choose either Safari or Camino.

Safari 3.04 is a good, but basic browser, with few useful plugins. The base of Safari, webkit, is still under development, but at a slower rate than that of Mozilla Gecko and it's missing some big features.

Camino 1.53, build on Mozilla Gecko 1.8.1 is just as fast as Safari 3.04, but has great search functionality (which comes from Mozilla's Find As You Type feature) which is great for finding links within a page and opening them by simply pressing Enter. Stability is great, although you won't get any plugin support on Camino. Another big big plus with Camino is its ad blocking feature, especially with its ability to block Flash animated ads, which are very difficult to ignore since they're bouncing around all the time.

You can read more about the fastest Mac browsers here.

I find Firefox really slow for downloading things (movies and images) onto the hard drive. Opera and Safari download fast in comparison. Things that can take two minutes to download on Firefox will just take two seconds to download with the other browsers, and I don't need a stopwatch to see the difference. Opera is really fast I've noticed for opening links. Camino seems a little slower, Safari is fast. Firefox is OK.

I've yet to find a Mac browser that is consistently faster than Demeter (based on Shiira v.1.2). It has more features and customization options than Safari, faster than Safari, Opera or Camino, and FAR faster than Firefox. It offers the benefits of being a Cocoa based application.

Shiira is a great browser, but the support has been better since hurrikenux Creative renamed to Demeter and began support of Shiira v.1.2, for which the Shiira developers seem to have stopped supporting.

Never having heard of it, I've just downloaded Demeter for a test drive. It does seem to be consistently faster than Camino. Haven't sorted out how to import my Camino bookmarks, but that might occur to me.

I've switched from Shiira to Demeter after being underwhelmed with Shiira 2.x; Demeter isn't perfect (tendency to crash on waken-after-sleep) but it has most of what I liked about Shiira 1.x plus the ability to drag-and-drop text from the browser body.

If you can get your bookmarks exported to Safari, Demeter (like Shiira) can piggyback, using your Safari bookmarks without bothering to "import" them. It can do so with Firefox bookmarks also but doesn't do that for Camino, sorry.

Camino can export its bookmarks as a document that Safari can import, so that's easy. I've done it.

After playing with Demiter a bit, however, I'm back to Camino. Demiter doesn't do tabs the way I want them (no matter how I fiddle with the prefs) and it doesn't do ad blocking unless you supply the list of adds to block. Not good enough yet - fast for sure, but not quite there.

I'm not sure how Demeter or Shiira are any faster than Safari, as they all use WebKit to render webpages.

I think the answer is that Camino has a few more features and the code for these slows it down marginally. Otherwise you're right -- you wouldn't pick one or the other for the speed difference.

I've always wondered that myself, but it has always been the case, since Shiira was pre-1.0 beta.

It's just streamlining the code as best you can, I would assume. Just because you use the same WebKit doesn't mean you implement it the same way.

I'm just waiting for the day when we don't even use browsers to use the web...

As far as im aware, safari will always be the fastest browser, just because Apple make it and they know how to make it uber fast. Camino is faster than firefox because its native, but firefox is a very powerful browser which is still very fast and has loads of useful addons.

yes, the reason why I am sticking to FireFox is because of the excellent plug in support and software development community...
I hope FireFox will one day become as fast as the other browsers...

I like running Firefox but it it rather slow and unresponsive particularly when you start to add the plugins. I use Camino as my browser most of the time and am pleased with the results

I'm not sure how this will affect us, but I heard that parts of Firefox for Mac have been completely rewritten, and it's now partly written in Cocoa. The beta version (3.0b1) seems a bit faster.

Check out OmniWeb. http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/

I love it's tab feature...puts Safari tabs to shame. It's favorite bar expands to add more bars when you add lots of bookmarks. It's Workspaces is similar to Leopard's Spaces and really nice for projects. I'm not saying it's the fastest, but feature wise it's tops.

If you're going to use multiple browsers, I suggest getting IC Switch. I like the feature where it puts a small icon in the menu bar that allows you to toggle which application you want as default for email, web, FTP etc. Quick and easy way to change default application for testing purposes. http://flip.macrobyte.net/software/ic-switch_en