Web browsers and speed

Where I work we use a home-made Transport Track & Trace System. I can't publish the page here because it contains company material, but I can say that the output for the people who need a complete overview of all ongoing transports, is a page with lots of tables:



and a lot of rows:



I used Coda to find out how many '

The transportation data (truck, shipper, consignee, forwarder, etc.) on this page is pulled from a database and the page is generated on the server, all done by a Lasso script and then send to the browser. We had some complaints about loading times, so I did a perceptual stopwatch test with different browsers and Mac OS X and Windows XP. The stopwatch started as I clicked OK on the HTTP-authentication dialog and stopped when the spinning wheel stops. Here they are:

iMac 24" from 2008 with OS X 10.6 on 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Safari 4.0.4 : +/- 55 seconds
Firefox 3.6 : +/- 90 seconds
Chrome 4.0.249 : After 4 minutes an execution dialog and it never ends loading.

Macbook Pro from 2009 with Windows XP Bootcamp on 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9600
Internet Explorer 8.0.6001 : After 4 minutes an execution dialog and it never ends loading.
Safari 4.0.4 : +/- 48 seconds
Firefox 3.6 : +/- 61 seconds
Chrome 4.0.249 : After 4 minutes an execution dialog and it never ends loading.

So it is true : Safari is the fastest browser.