The fastest web browser for web streaming music

[alant4321]

For music amateur who likes to use CAS (Computer As Source), one of source is “web streaming music” such as internet radio, YouTube, etc… The speed depends on your home ISP, LAN card and web browser. Passing through the computer bus such as PCI, SATA, the digital streaming music will output to sound card. There are three types of sound card such as “built-in” motherboard sound chipset (e.g. HD Audio) or “add-on” internal PCI sound card and external USB DAC.
A speed test is done to compare different web browsers including Google Chrome, Opera, FireFox, Lunascape, SeaMonkey and Internet Explorer as attached. The result shows that Google Chrome and Opera are the fastest while Internet Explorer 8 is the slowest. For this reason, I am now using Google Chrome and feel that the speed is excellent fast. Just for reference!

[BionicSniper]

The only thing that browser speed will effect is the time it takes to load.

[Pano]

And why I've been using Opera for about 12 years. Can't say it's any better for music, tho.

[Boscoe]

I'm a chrome fan myself. Have been since it launched, IE is crap so is Firefox despite a lot of peoples thoughts.

[vacuphile]

I work with IE8 and no problems playing music. Sometimes measurable differences are just irrelevant in use.

vac

[alant4321]

If you switch to Google Chrome, you do not need to delete Internet Explorer. They can co-exist. You can import the bookmark of IE8 into Google Chrome without re-typing website address. Both Google Chrome and Internet Explorer are free of charge. There are over 50% of users for IE8 while only 5% users for Google Chrome nowadays.
Many people confuse with Mbps and MB/s. “b” refers to “Bit” and “B” refers to “Byte”, thus 1 MB/s = 8 Mbps. Some data of web streaming path are listed for reference.
Your home ISP, say 100M. It is 100Mbps which is equivalent to 12.5 MB/s.
The minimum CPU speed is Pentium III which is sufficient for all computers.
LAN card up to 10/100/1000M Giga speed.
It is OK for all computer bus interfaces as below.
=>SATA2 = 384 MB/s (i.e. 3 Gbit/s) and SATA3 = 768 MB/s (i.e. 6 Gbit/s)
=>PCI = 133 MB/s and PCI-E = 2,048 MB/s (i.e. 16 Gbit/s)
=>USB2.0 = 60 MB/s and USB3.0 = 640 MB/s (5 Gbit/s)
=>FireWire 1384b = 410 MB/s (3.2 Gbit/s)

If the speed of your home ISP is sufficient, then the bottleneck is the web browser. For pure audio streaming (e.g. internet radio), it is sufficient which requires less than 5 MB/s. Hence, the difference is not significant. For soundtrack movie streaming with both video and audio, it is the problem particularly with HD video soundtrack (i.e. 720p or 1080p) which sometimes requires up to 20MB/s. Using Google Chrome, you feel an extremely fast speed while Internet Explorer 8 is at dead slow speed.

(Remark: the clock in computer is mainly for timing of CPU processing and does not need to synchronize with your sound card or external USB DAC in audio application. Depends on the patch of digital data sending (i.e. protocol), the jitter problem mainly depends on your sound card or USB DAC)

[planet10]

Chrome won't run on either of my music computers. I would think that the biggest limitation of streaming music would be the limited quality of the stream.

dave

[Pano]

It is, for sure.

[alant4321]

It is no doubt to say as you do not expect to listen music at 24Bit/192KHz Master Studio quality format such as WAV, Flac, etc… from web streaming due to the limitation of speed processing of HD audio data. Most common format for web streaming is MPEG quality, but still sounds good.

[planet10]

Originally Posted by alant4321

Most common format for web streaming is MPEG quality, but still sounds good.

I would disagree with the sounds good part.

dave