Which browser is REALLY the fastest?

Earlier today Lifehacker.com posted an article about this very topic.  Their goal? To test commonly used web browsers and see how fast each of them were in different categories, and compare them to each other.  Considering Internet Explorer 9 just came out a few weeks ago, the stable release of Firefox 4 came out today, as well as the usual updates that come with Chrome and Opera, it's the perfect time to run these tests and let everyone know about the results.

The results?  If you would like to read the entire article with pretty graphs and a few snippets of interesting information in the way the results were determined, or what they mean check it out here.  If you just wanna know "Which browser is the absolute fastest", (based on the six categories tested) the winners are:

Opera 11
Chrome 10
Chrome 11
Firefox 4
Internet Explorer 9 (no real surprise here)

So if you're still clinging to that old Internet Explorer, you may want to think about upgrading to something a little faster.  You'll probably see a pretty large improvement if you were to watch a video on Youtube.

On that note, if you don't need many extensions, or special extras or "goodies" go ahead and try out Opera 11.  It might just shave a few minutes off your daily routine.  Maybe.

Kontingency out.

EDIT:  I forgot to mention something I found the other day, and now is the perfect time to tell you all.  If you like for pages to load faster, theres a neat little trick when using Google Chrome to have your GPU aid your computer in rendering web pages.  Open Chrome and go to "about:flags".  In about the middle of the page there are 3 options.  GPU Accelerated Compositing, GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D, and Web Page Prerendering.  The first 2 Options will use your actual GPU hardware (the graphics card inside your computer) to help load the webpage.  Try it and see if you like it, or notice better performance.