Today’s John Locke Award goes to this guy.
Fed up with all the discussion about which browser is fastest, he organized a set of experiments and ran tests to determine some results for himself. He John Locke-d it, as we like to put it here at the Port.
It is obvious that a lot of time was spent on these tests and the author was kind enough to publish charts of his results, some of which are quite interesting.
With these standardized test cases, it would be very interesting to see how much these figures could be influenced by simple server-side optimizations such as compression, pipelining and even caching in the case of the History tests.
It would also be interesting to see which browsers might mishandle these optimizations and lose their ranking.