Futuremark, a leading creator of benchmarks that measure performance of personal computers’ components, on Thursday unveiled Peacekeeper, a free online benchmarking tool for measuring and comparing the performance of common Internet browsers.

“People have more choice now in how they experience the Internet than ever before. But they may not realize that performance between browsers can vary dramatically, especially on lower-end PCs. With Peacekeeper, it’s simple to compare different browsers and see which one offers the best performance on your PC,” said Jukka Mäkinen, head of PC products and services at Futuremark.

Competition between browsers is very intensive these days, there are at least five big browsers available now: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. According to Futuremark, so far, words have been the only shots fired in the long-running browser wars. Now, with Peacekeeper web users finally have an easy to use, impartial tool for measuring and comparing the performance of different web browsers.

Futuremark’s Peacekeeper is a new online benchmark from Futuremark that realistically simulates the load placed on the browser by common JavaScript functions as used by popular, modern websites. For users who prioritize speed and performance, Peacekeeper helps answer the question of which browser is best for them.

Many websites, such as social networks, video sharing communities and web-mail services, place a heavy load on the web browser. For people who use these sites a lot, changing browsers to one that performs faster can make visiting those sites more fun, with less waiting for pages to load and display correctly. Peacekeeper makes that choice easier than ever.

Tags: Futuremark, Peacekeeper