Chromium is pretty fast on the N900, and it's specifications are slightly higher than the N8x0s.

It might be just around MicroB's speed, I guess.

browser speed these days are mostly about javascript, iirc.

tear is nice but ageing. could someone, please, explain what those tear-improvements are?

as for n800 browsers:
- firefox (fennec) is nice, but sometimes too slow. it has innovative user interface (drag to show toolbar). usually it helps but sometimes the new UI does work against site design (e.g. google reader).
especially good in fennec is clever double-click to zoom!

- new opera is nice, but i expected, it would be a little faster. zooming is not smart, as in firefox. in fact, sometimes it zoomes in/out when I want to click the link.
bonus for opera is "turbo mode", that can help with reducing traffic data, if you use internet connection where you pay for data transfered.

- tear is nice and reasonably fast, probably fastest. UI is IMHO worst from the above mentioned browsers.
One feature I really dislike is you have to be carefull what to touch, if you want to drag the page. if you touch link, it will act as link.

- microb stopped working in my n800 and i don't care :-)

tear would be my favourite, if some problems would be fixed.
I also expect it would be faster, if new version with recent webkit build could be made.

i have just found out, there is new tear 0.3.6!!! (i will check it later today)

Re: Opera being very slow. Was extremely slow for me with "Turbo" enabled. When I disabled Turbo, it ran much faster.

for me it's not extremely slow. i just expected it would be faster :-)
especially downloading seem to be slower than expected.

opera mobile is working very well for me on s60 phone (nokia n85), probably the best available browser for s60.

maemo version is ok, could be better. mobile firefox and tear are better in some areas.

Modifications made to Tear by Mitrandir. They will hopefully be integrated with the regular Tear source code. The Tear thread is long, but the discussion you want picks up here.

You are right that the decompression seems to be slow work for the N800's processor. Turbo could also sometimes cause delays at the other end, if Opera's proxy servers are busy. These delays counteract the time saving that you get from reducing the size of the download.

The net effect depends on the speed of your connection and the kind of web page you are trying to load. On a fast connection, or browsing lightweight pages, Turbo is likely to be slower than non-Turbo. It's the other way round when you are loading a bloated page via a slow connection.

Here is an example. (Sorry that the web page is not in English. There is an English version at http://www.ferroviedellostato.it/homepage_en.html . My results are for the Italian version.)

Connection: 56k dialup -> Zoom BT modem -> N800.

Web page : http://www.ferroviedellostato.it/

Non-Turbo Opera Mobile took approx. 2 min 30 sec to display the page completely. Tear was about the same. Opera Mobile with Turbo took less than 1 min 20 sec. In all cases, the page had been loaded to the browser on a previous occasion, so any caching effect should apply to all three. Turbo compression reduced the download from nearly 1 MB to about 315 kB.

Another comparison can be made by looking at one of the widgets on the page. The site is about train travel, and the widget in question is for looking up train times and ticket prices. This widget became usable in 19 sec. on Opera Mobile with Turbo, but not until 46 sec. on Tear.

For me, it's all about Firefox. Definitely not the fastest, but it's also not that slow. It's features really give it the edge.

And that's on the N800? or N810?