Steve Souders is currently doing more to improve the performance of web pages and web browsers than anyone else out there. When he worked at Yahoo! he was responsible for YSlow (a great tool for measuring ways to improve the performance of your site) and he wrote the book on improving page performance: High Performance Web Sites. Now he works for Google but much of what he's up to is the same: Making web pages load faster.

I've been really excited about one of his recent project releases: UA Profiler. The profiler is a tool that you can run in your browser to determine the status of a number of network-performance-specific features that tie heavily to browser page load performance.

Here's a look at the current breakdown:



We can see Firefox 3.1 taking a lead, fixing 9 out of 11 of the issues tested for. Firefox 3, Chrome, and Safari 4 all come after with 8 fixed. Firefox 2, Safari 3.1, and IE 8 next at 7. Those numbers help to give you an overall feel of the page load performance that you'll see in a browser. (Naturally these tests don't take any rendering or JavaScript performance numbers into account but network performance generally trumps their total runtime anyway.)


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Analysis – February turned out to be the month of the beta browsers, in a more significant way than we have seen in any other month before. While overall market shares remained relatively stable for the top 5 of browser developers, there were major shifts in beta browser market share. Microsoft saw strong gains for Internet Explorer 8 and Apple hit a home run with Safari 4. Mozilla does not promote its Firefox 3.1 and trails its rivals in beta browser adoption, but has the strongest adoption rate of its most current stable browser.

If February is any indication, then Mozilla’s wild ride may be over for now. Market share data released by Net Applications shows that Firefox still gained share in February, albeit at a much slower pace than in recent months. Internet Explorer still lost, but only marginally and Apple took a big hit in average browser share in February. According to the data, Internet Explorer dropped from 68.18% to 68.17%, Firefox gained from 21.75% to 21.96% and Safari dropped from 7.70% to 7.42%.

Google’s Chrome climbed from 1.13% to 1.16% and Opera gained 0.02 points from 0.68% to 0.70%. Eagle-eyed readers may notice that those numbers deviate quite a bit from the actual February average based on Net Applications’ daily numbers (IE: 67.26%; Firefox: 21.82%; Safari: 8.15%; Chrome: 1.15%; Opera: 0.71%), which is due to the correction of errors that may occur in daily reporting, the market research firm said.






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