Not too many years ago, threads on online forums would often have titles like "New Ferrari Pics (56K users, make coffee)" as a way of warning people with slow connections that they’d be stuck for a while.  Now, Tom’s Hardware has established which modern Web browsers will slow folks down – and which won’t.

Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari were pitted against each other in a test focused purely on speed and performance.  Startup times, memory usage, page load times, JavaScript tests, and a number of other factors were weighed.

Here’s the upshot (if you somehow missed this article’s title): Chrome won.  It did best in several categories and placed second in a number of others, defeating many of its rivals by a clear margin.

This led Adam Overa to write, "Any way you want to analyze the data, Google’s Chrome comes out on top.  That’s why we’re not only calling Chrome the winner of our Web Browser Grand Prix, but we’re also awarding it the Best of Tom’s Hardware Award – the first time we’ve given such an honor to a software product.  If you haven’t yet downloaded Google Chrome, you just don’t know what you’re missing."

Opera, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer ranked second, third, fourth, and fifth, respectively, in the browser speed test.