Now *that’s* a fast browser!

One of the bigger stories on Techmeme right now about the latest beta version of Apple’s Safari browser and how fast it is. But just how fast is it? In CNET News’ article a 3d chart is used to illustrate the point.

(ref: CNET News - Safari 4 benchmarked: 42x faster than IE 7, 3.5x faster than Firefox 3)

There are several things wrong with the graph above from a data visualization perspective but there is one that is glaringly obvious and absolutely relevant to the topic at hand. As a result of the data-obfuscating 3d perspective of the graph it looks like the Safari 4, Minefield and Chrome browsers performed their tests in less than 0 milliseconds! Are we talking pre-cognition here? Maybe these browsers know the web page you want to view before you do; a pretty cool feature.

I think I may have heard somewhere that Microsoft research has been trying to crack the browser pre-cognition market too with a new development platform named ESP.NET :)

Here are two attempts I had using the same data.

…and another in grayscale