Safari can cause 76% more slowdown than Firefox

I know that I'm probably not alone here when I say that I find starting up Firefox on OS X unbearably slow. Compared to other Mac browsers like Safari and Opera as well as the Windows version of Firefox, Mac Firefox's startup time is inexcusably slow. For that reason, I generally use Safari on my home system, even though I prefer the feature-set and page rendering of Firefox. Well, if a recent report making the rounds offers any truth, it looks like Mac Firefox might just be worth the wait. The mysterious "Dr. Macenstein" has published a series of benchmarks that demonstrate how Firefox and Safari affect overall system performance. In all of the tests performed, both Photoshop CS2 and After Effects performed considerably slower while being run alongside Safari as opposed to when Firefox is running. To be fair, the good doctor is using a specific set of applications and hardware to produce these results. But it would be surprising if these figures didn't point to something of a general trend, at least on certain types of systems.

For the benchmarks:
- see the full post at Macenstein