In their Safari for Windows announcement, Steve Jobs and Apple marketing claim some serious performance advantages over IE and Firefox. My understanding is that they're using an outdated test suite that doesn't really measure real-world situations. These kinds of benchmarks are easy to cheat, too. A vendor could, for example, add code to a browser that reported to the test suite that the test was completed long before it actually was. A vendor could also implement a feature incompletely or fail to implement it at all, cutting way down on the time it takes a particular task or set of tasks to complete. One could certainly imagine a page rendering faster if images weren't loaded or divs weren't positioned correctly, or some other web feature were disabled, not implemented, or implemented incorrectly.
Now, I'm not saying that Apple has done any of this. What I'm saying is that these kinds of benchmarks can be misleading and can easily be manipulated.
So what's a user to do? My suggestion is try out the browser for a while and see how it fairs on the sites you regularly visit. If it's faster and functionally complete, great, but don't just take a vendor's word for it.
I use a lot of contemporary web applications from companies like Google, Yahoo, Zoho, and others and for me Firefox is considerably faster and more functional than Win Safari or IE 7. Michael Calore, at the Wired blog Compiler, seems to have compared the three browsers and his experience is also that Firefox is faster on Google services.
Have you done side by side comparisons? What's your experience with the mainstream browsers, Firefox, IE, and Safari?
