In our last web browser comparison, we stood beta versions of the most popular browsers against a wall and shook them down tough-guy-style. In today’s comparison, just a few weeks later thanks to ever-increasingly frequent updating, we’re here to compare the final versions of the most popular web browsers.

We tested five browsers (Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4, Google Chrome, Opera 11 and Safari 5). For each browser, we chose the latest stable version available. All the software was tested in the same manner, according to the following criteria: javascript management,  compatibility with the current HTML5 standards, and the consumption of CPU resources.

The benchmark used for JavaScript was SunSpider (which measures the execution time of multiple functions, the highest number is therefore the worst score). For HTML5, we used the benchmark GuiMark 2, which proposes three different tests ( posting a vector table, a video game simulation, and several columns of dynamic text) and gives its results of many images a second. The compatibility of the standards was measured via the Acid3 test. We also measured the consumption of resources for each browser while launching, as well as while browsing the most popular sites (Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Wikipedia, BlogSpot and Twitter), checking via the task manager for memory consumed by each browser (restarting the computer between each test to zero out the memory).

We tested the web browsers on a computer with a 2 GHz Intel Core2 Duo T7250 processor. It runs on Windows 7 Professional (64 bit) and has 2GB of random access memory. It should be noted that, though the tests performed on these browsers from our computer can provide a standard by which to compare all of the browsers we tested, we can’t claim that the results of our tests have any cross-platform validity  – we simply can’t claim that these browsers will perform similarly to our tests on other computers.