Which browser do you think is the fastest for doing your online banking? We recently asked you in our Facebook poll:
And the winner is…?
Over 70 per cent of you thought Chrome was the fastest, Mozilla Firefox came in second, with Safari third and Internet Explorer fourth.
The download on browsers
So what is browser speed and how does it actually determine how fast things load when you use NetBank?
To most people, a web browser is nothing more than “the internet”. It’s that icon on your computer you use for browsing news, Facebook, Google, doing your banking. However, the web browser you use and how it’s set up can significantly influence your browsing speed.
To understand this better, it’s worth considering roughly what happens in your browser while you are using NetBank:
- Your browser makes a connection to our servers, and downloads a secure web page.
- Your browser then downloads images, JavaScript and visual styles.
- Your browser ‘runs’ the JavaScript. Sometimes this is just after the page loads, sometimes it’s while you’re using the web site.
There are a few things that can impact how fast this is. Firstly, the core financial data on NetBank is actually really small and downloads very quickly. The static content – images, styles, JavaScript – is collectively by far the heaviest thing your browser needs to download, comprising of around 94 per cent of the overall download. We do what we can to make this part painless, asking your browser to keep this in memory. This makes a big difference – instead of downloading the images on every single page, you only download these once per session.
Hanging on
However, if you’re like most people, you’ll visit NetBank 3-4 times a week. Almost none of the images you download ever change, so we ask your browser to hang on to these for as long as possible. Most modern browsers will do just that: Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer will keep all of this content for a period of time. Safari, however, won’t: every time you log on to NetBank, all the heavy content has to be downloaded again.
Less trippy
Secondly, the way we download content is important. Each time your browser needs to download something from us, it needs to make a separate trip to the server. If we have too many separate small files to download, your browser has to make many trips. We optimise to keep these round trips to a minimum, but your browser can also help: Internet Explorer 9, and all versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari all download lots of files concurrently. However, older versions of Internet Explorer honour an old internet standard, limiting you to two files at a time.
Snappy Javascript
Thirdly, we’re doing more and more with Javascript (which runs inside your browser and makes web pages more dynamic). How fast this runs depends on which browser you use. Newer browsers have heavily optimised their Javascript engines, and consequently can be far ‘snappier’. Using Javascript can also help us make pages faster: we can load your experience in stages, and also let you to do things ‘in-line’ without having to reload an entire page.
While we absolutely prefer our customers to use the latest modern browsers, we do our utmost to ensure we don’t prevent the older browsers from working well too – we want NetBank to work on the browser our customers want to use. So, if we haven’t mentioned your preferred browser in this this post, it doesn’t mean it won’t work (and if you do have problems, we’d like to know).
Latest version
Our key recommendations for you to get the fastest internet experience on NetBank is to use a modern browser: the latest version of Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer (Safari is a good bet too, although it would be faster if it hung on to static content between sessions). We also recommend that, no matter what browser you have, you try to use the default browser caching behaviour.
