A Comparative Performance Analysis of Popular Internet Browsers in Current Web Applications

As more and more services become available on the Internet, the issue of fast and secured access to online resources gains more importance. The growth of the internet has encouraged a high number of people to explore and take advantage of the World Wide Web (www). The window to the World Wide Web is a web browser, hence the development of various web browsers in the market today. A comparative study of four web browsers namely Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Netscape was carried out. A web portal developed and fully tested was used to evaluate the performance of the four browsers. The results revealed that Mozilla Firefox and Netscape perform best in down load time, Internet Explorer performs best in memory usage, privacy and security, Mozilla Firefox and Netscape performs best in Page Layout, and Opera performs best in speed and performance. Key words: World Wide Web, Internet Browser, W3C, APIs, Milne