The most important program on your PC is your web browser. Oh sure, your bread and butter work may be on QuickBooks, Photoshop, or Premiere Pro, but where do you find information or exchange emails? Answer: Your web browser. Heck, Google has proven that all you really need to do most work is the Chrome web browser on a Chromebook.  And, Microsoft wants you to move to the web-based Windows 365 Cloud PC. And, what do you need to get the most from your web browser? Speed, speed, and still more speed. 

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Web browser developers know this, so lately there's been a lot of effort behind making them ever faster. So, who's the fastest now?  I put the most popular Windows 10 browsers to the test. 

Here are our contenders in order of popularity. First comes Google Chrome 93. It's easily the most popular web browser. Next up is Microsoft Edge 93, which recently switched to using Google's open-source Chromium web browser. Today, except for Mozilla Firefox, all the web browsers that matter, such as Opera, Vivaldi and Brave, run on top of Chrome's open-source base Chromium. Firefox, while declining in popularity, is the third-most popular Windows web browser.

Believe it or not, Internet Explorer (IE) 11 is still hanging in there, coming in as the next-most popular Windows 10 web browser. However, even on my 2018 browser benchmarks, it was just awful. I took a quick look at it, and I decided that between Microsoft getting ready to retire it and its dreadful performance, I wouldn't waste time benchmarking it. If you're still using IE, just stop already. You'll be better with anything else.

Firefox was followed by Opera 78. This was originally a Norwegian-based browser, but it was acquired by a Chinese private-equity company in 2016. Next is Brave 1.29. This open-source browser's owners claim to do the best job of protecting your privacy. Still, in 2020 they admitted to sharing default autocomplete answers with an affiliate cryptocurrency exchange. Finally, there's Vivaldi 4.1. This was started by Opera expatriates, who missed the original Opera's community and look-and-feel. 

Although all of these browsers, except Firefox, are clone brothers, they do not have the same performance. Each vendor has changed the Chromium code to make them quite different from each other. 

I benchmarked these browsers on my Windows 10 Beelink GTR7 Mini test PC. This runs Window 10 Pro May 2021 Update, version 21H1. It's powered by a 4GHz AMD Ryzen 7 3750H processor. The CPU is backed by 16GB DDR4 RAM. For storage, it comes equipped with a 512GB NVMe SSD. It's connected to the internet via my NETGEAR 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Unmanaged Switch (GS108) and a Spectrum Gigabit cable connection, which really delivers just over 900 Megabits per second (Mbps) speeds. 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-fastest-web-browser/