HELSINKI, FINLAND – MAY 12th, 2009 – Firefox and Internet Explorer between them can claim close to 90% of all web users. Yet results from over 400,000 users of the new Peacekeeper™ browser benchmark show that these two are at the bottom of the class when it comes to performance.

With Peacekeeper leaving beta today, Futuremark® Corporation has released some surprising statistics showing that the browsers with the highest performance scores are also the least popular with web users.

Peacekeeper is a free online tool for measuring and comparing the performance of internet browsers. Many websites, such as social networks, video sharing communities and webmail services, place a heavy load on the web browser. For people who use these sites a lot, changing browsers to one that performs faster can make a dramatic difference.

Jukka Mäkinen, Head of PC Products and Services at Futuremark, said, "People have more choice now in how they experience the internet than ever before but most seem content to stick with the browser they have.
It’s surprising that even though cost isn’t an issue, the browsers that offer the best performance are also the least popular, at least for now."

He went on to add, "We’re finding that Peacekeeper is driving people to try browsers they may not have considered before. Our data suggest that Chrome is benefitting most from a combination of strong Peacekeeper performance scores and features that people seem to like."

Web users can run Peacekeeper now by visiting www.futuremark.com/peacekeeper