Which browser do you consider the fastest?

If this question was made to me an year ago, with no doubts I would have answered Chrome (or its Chromium variation). However, other browsers have keep innovating and I have even come back to Firefox 4 a while ago.

In order to measure the speed of a browser, automated benchmarks don't always cut it: tests mainly cover the JavaScript engine, but usually left out startup time or the responsiveness of the user interface. Moreover, performance is affected by other factors: your processor and its cores, your operating system, the current load. And the fact that its browser pushes its own benchmarks.

Thus the ultimate judge of browser speed is the opinions from a large sample of users - particularly power users such as programmers who push the browser to the limits.

In this poll, we're trying to find out from you which browser is considered the faster. These are our contestants.

Chrome and Chromium

Based on WebKit, it originally presented speed as its main selling point, and was the first to pioneer process isolation for different windows and tabs. At the time of this writing, it has reached version 12.0.742.124 (good luck keeping track of that).

Firefox

Based on Gecko engine, features hardware acceleration and it's struggling with Chrome for between geeks. 3.x versions weren't performance-savy, but Firefox 4 and 5 were vastly better and made many people switching back. You can play Runfield to see how fast a fox can run.

Safari

Based on WebKit, it has the advantage of running on a closed optimized platform like Mac OS X or iOS. It has reached version 5.1 and with WebKit2 supports multiple processes, and dropped support for operating systems older than Tiger.

IE

Based on the Trident proprietary engine (and now the Chakra JS engine), it only supports Windows. The main focus of the team has been on improving compliance to the new HTML 5 standard, but has speed been affected (positively on negatively)? I haven't used this browser in years.

IE 6.x should hopefully be dead, 7 and 8 are the most diffused, and 9 has been released as stable in March, being the first with DirectX integration. IE 10 has been presented at the same time, but it will be a long journey to its release.

Opera

Based on the Presto engine, has reached version 11.50; it enjoys a small dedicated market share. From version 10.5, it features new Javascript and graphic engines and even strange performance features like Opera Turbo, where compressed response are sent to you from Opera's servers for greater speed.