Can anyone else confim this?

I get much worse pings using Opera than IE or Firefox on speedtest.net. I have always noticed the animations to be real jerky in Opera (like the little speedometer thing, especially on uploads), but I just thought that was my ISP or my router.

Here is what I've done on my work connection.
Opera 9.27


IE 7


Firefox 2.0.0.14


Opera 9.27 Retry


I think I can reproduce this at home based on what I'm seeing on my work connection and what I remember it doing in Opera at home. It would be interesting to see if anyone else gets worse results in Opera than IE or FF.

Not seeing any significant difference at home.

Opera 9.5 beta (build 9945) it is newer than 9.27 which was tested above


Firefox 2.0.0.14


IE 7


I also tested Safari and Opera on OS X 10.5.3, but their pings were quite a bit higher. That machine is a 450Mhz G4 though and isn't even supposed to be running Leopard, so I don't trust the results on it.

Speedtest.net uses flash to run the test and actually uses your system time to calculate the speed, not so much the actual amount of data you passed at peak. Due to different implementations of flash and different performance aspects of the browsers, your system/browser speed can actually impact what speedtest.net shows

For instance, try going to speedtest.net in firefox or IE6 inside of a virtual machine on a slow machine - it will produce impossibly high results, like 100meg+ on occasion.

Small variations in system performance can alter what you see, which would explain differences browser to browser.

Don't be too surprised by it.