Windows 7 web browsers: Faster than Vista, slower than XP

Extensive testing by the blogging crew at BetaNews is offering some insight into how Windows 7 will perform when it hits the real world. The results are encouraging, but not absolutely thrilling: Based on aggregate tests of five major web browsers (in various recent/current versions), Windows XP is still the faster operating system when it comes to the internet experience. Specifically, XP is an average of 13 percent faster at running your browser than Windows 7 is.

The final version of Windows 7 as it will appear when it ships in October was used for the testing.

The good news is that Windows 7 is substantially faster than Windows Vista when it comes to the web: XP's most up-to-date version is a full 29 percent faster than Vista, so Windows 7 has closed that performance gap quite a bit. Compared directly, Win 7 is 17 percent faster than Vista.

The results are largely consistent across the board: From browser to browser, each tends to run fastest on XP, second-fastest on Windows 7, and slowest on Vista. Based on BetaNews's tests, Chrome is the speed champion regardless of OS, with Safari close behind -- though both perform even better on XP-loaded systems. The performance differential is lowest with Opera and Internet Explorer, where all three operating systems tend to turn in about the same performance scores (though, again, XP tends to be fastest, just by a small margin).

So is any of this cause for alarm? No, not really. Despite numbers that look a little scary, a 13 percent performance differential is actually not much to worry about, and most users probably won't notice the extra fractions of a second that Windows 7 takes to open web pages and do other internet operations. I wouldn't let these numbers keep you from upgrading from XP to Windows 7, if that's been your plan.

Also, remember that it took some time for Windows XP to evolve into a suitably fast and robust operating system, and the OS has had nearly a decade and three service packs to streamline the way it runs. It's likely that Windows 7 will follow suit as patches and performance tweaks are issued in the coming months.