Slowest commonly used browser?
Hmm, I used Safari 5 the other day on this MacBook (on which I usually use Firefox 4.0 beta), and Safari seemed hugely slower than Firefox to me. Really sluggish. Couldn't stand it. So I looked to see how it is supposed to compare. (Incidentally, I've found IE8 to be all but unusable too due to similar sloth, on a recentish Windows notebook which runs FF well.)
Anyway, the interesting thing here is that it seems (according to http://arewefastyet.com/) that Safari is a lot _faster_ at running JavaScript code. So why the apparent sloth?
Perhaps making Javascript run faster does not necessarily make browsing faster (apologies for iconoclasm so early in the morning)! I have a slowish (0.6Mb/s) internet connection, which of course means that fetching things takes longer than it might. Well, whatever the cause, Firefox does a much better job of giving me a snappy browsing experience, including for Javascript-heavy (and AJAX-heavy) sites.
Is it starting to be time to use one browser as a web browser (viewing "web pages"), and a different one as a runtime (for "web applications")? Is it time for developers to investigate (shock horror) the time taken to render things to the display, rather than that taken to run software written in Javascript? Would be interested to see coarse-level profiles of complete page-load time broken down by fetch / render / run Javascript etc. for the different browsers.