I recently purchased a
LinkSys Wireless-N router ($99 on sale at
Radio Shack) so I can roam around the house with
my laptop. As a result I decided to do some bandwidth testing using
broadbandreports.com's
speed test as there is a server in
Palo Alto, ~26 miles from my home, and it seemed like the results I was getting from
Firefox were a bit slow. I started up IE to do some comparisons and found a not insignificant difference. As you can see on the graphic
ComCast is my ISP which is easily three to four times as fast as what I was getting with my old DSL connection.
Results Using Internet Explorer 7.0.6000.16473
Results Using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6
These results have been fairly consistent across a number of tests. I'm wondering if there is perhaps a performance penalty for running Firefox from a USB drive? All of these tests were conducted on my laptop.
I'll have test again at the office (also wireless) tomorrow and see how things compare. Of course, I'll probably install Firefox for a true apples-to-apples comparison.