Opera was the very first browser to offer the concept of compression-proxy for faster web-browsing on Desktop and Mobiles, Google has also started offering data-compression proxy on Google Chrome for Mobile phones and is also available to Desktop Chrome users via an official and unofficial browser extension.

Taking the technology further Opera Max is now a dedicated app for Android platform allowing data-management and data-savings features which now even supports shrinking of videos and photos on almost any app on mobile data, as well as Wi-Fi.

Google Chrome web-browser on mobile-platforms features the option to reduce bandwidth costs and enable faster web-browsing utilizing the "Google Data Compression Proxy". The same had been made available to Google Chrome Desktop users via an unofficial Data Compression Proxy extension as shared earlier, now the feature is officially made available by Google as new Data Saver web-browser extension.

Once Data Saver extension is activated on Google Chrome, the web-browser will use Google servers to compress pages you visit before downloading them. Taking user's privacy into consideration, the service will bypass the compression proxy for SSL and incognito web-pages.

Similar to Opera Turbo technology, Google Chrome features an "data compression proxy" for Android and Apple iOS mobile-devices which when enabled opens a connection between the user phone and optimization servers running in Google's datacenters relaying all non-encrypted HTTP requests over this connection. The SSL secured proxy connection performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with gzip compression for all resources, DNS lookups from proxy and images converted to WebP with resulting sizes upto 80% smaller provides huge bandwidth savings and resulting in faster web-browsing experience.

This feature is not available for Google Chrome Desktop users, however a free Chrome extension now allows users to get the same savings on their desktop computers. The extension sends all HTTP (but not HTTPS) traffic through Chrome Data Compression Proxy server, which utilizes SPDY protocol to speed up web browsing. Users can check bandwidth savings by visiting chrome://net-internals/#bandwidth and can disable compression-proxy by clicking the green bolt icon from the toolbar.

After taking the crown for being the "fastest web-browser" in the latest 2013 Tom's Hardware benchmarks, the free and open-source web-browser Firefox grabbed another feather for it's cap by being the most stable of the lot. Sauce Labs an automated selenium unit testing service provider, crunched their data of more then 55+ million test runs and plotted the web-browser crash rate letting users a glimpse into the most stable and most crash-prone web-browser as shown below.

Firefox 22 has taken the crown of being the world's fastest web-browser from Google Chrome in the latest authoritative benchmarks carried out by TomsHardware. The comprehensive web-browser benchmark uses geometric mean of various performance and non-performance metrics to score the final result.

Opera recently poked fun at Google Chrome speed advertisements and this time they have proved that Opera is indeed faster than Google Chrome holding the crown for being the world's fastest web-browser for the time-being.

While every other web-browser is claiming to be the world's fastest, Google has their own interesting way of demoing Chrome as the real crown holder by comparing it's webpage speed rendering times with a potato gun and lighting.

Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha was promising and as expected the final version of Opera 10.5 Final is a pleasure to use, Opera 10.5 features the brand new Carakan JavaScript rendering engine which is said to be 7x faster than its predecessor, coupled with a brand-new interface design and support for latest web-technologies this browser is surely going to be hit.

Opera is claiming their latest Windows browser release as worlds fastest web-browser, but in our benchmark tests using PeaceKeeper this claim does not seem to be valid as shown in the results below.