TBB Speedtest and Mac Browsers

TBB Speedtest seems to give strange results on Safari, particularly latency and upload speeds.

Here is a result on Firefox: 54ms; 6.9Mb/s down; 0.52Mb/s up

Firefox

On Safari: 125ms; 6.9Mb/s down; 0.35Mb/s up

Safari

On Firefox, using Flash: 60ms; 7.0Mb/s down; 0.76Mb/s up

Firefox Flash

On Safari, using Flash: 123ms; 7.1Mb/s down; 0.35Mb/s up

Safari Flash

So which is correct and why the 100% differences?

I have, of course, done multiple tests and the differences are systematic, not statistical variation.

What is Firefox flash? If running on a page that talks about flash, its not really Flash, but same test these days

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/15978436735... Safari
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/15978437053... Firefox

No big difference here. Suspect something to do with how the browsers may be handling the traffic i.e. imposing extra latency in some scenarios but with slightly faster connections this becomes so minor to not be visible.

Thanks

FirefoxFlash is the TBB Flash speedtester accessed from Firefox.

It may be that the differences are smaller for links with higher upstream rates, but a latency difference of a factor of two and an upstream throughput difference of more than a factor of two seem to me to be significant.

I tried the same comparison on speedtest.net-

On Safari: 32ms; 6.93Mb/s; 0.85Mb/s

Safari

On Firefox: 32ms; 6.75Mb/s; 0.85Mb/s

Firefox

No statistically significant difference.

There is no flash speed tester anymore hence the question. What URL?

On the Tools - speedtest page, scrolling down, "Our old version is still available if you want to run out Flash based tester, but this no longer links to your profile".

The link leads to a page starting "The speedtester uses a Flash Player and if our tester does not load or fails to run we recommend checking you have the latest version of Flash installed and enabled in your web browser ...."

I don't know if that is still true or if the link runs the normal test, but it just gave this result.

The standard Tools >> speedtest link gave this result.

Both run over wifi to a Three HomeFi Huawei B311 wireless router.

My mobile phone on its own 4G+ gives far better of course. Well over 120Mbps on the multi-stream, 60'ish on the single stream.

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 20-Aug-20 10:04:20)

Have updated the FAQ to remove the old links

If the original poster is up for some time just running tests then might be able to produce a specific version that can be tuned to their scenario in the presumption that others using the same browser will also see the same when using ADSL/ADSL2+.

The version of OSX which may be partly behind why the different behaviour and is a rare beast in the result.

Edited by MrSaffron (Thu 20-Aug-20 09:45:31)

Yes, the link I was using is http://labs.thinkbroadband.com/flashipv4/ which came from the text:

Alternate Speed Tests
The test by default is performed over SSL. If you want to test standard HTTP performance we suggest using our standalone HTTP test.
Our old version is still available if you want to run out Flash based tester, but this no longer links to your profile

I have found the differences in upload speed and latency using the TBB speed tester relative to speedtest.net and the flash tester on OS10.11, 10.12 and 10.13, with Safari updated to the extent possible to support end-point. The system that produced the numbers I quoted was OS10.13.6 with Safari 13.1.2 and Firefox 79.0.

Hope this helps.

I've just removed them from my post as well .

Also please see a relevant PM in a moment .

https://labs1.thinkbroadband.com/hs

Need to see what difference this version makes to what ajseeds is seeing

Edited by MrSaffron (Thu 20-Aug-20 11:19:41)

On Safari

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/15980031626...

On Firefox

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/15980034663...

Much the same.