This should roughly simulate what most people might have open in a browser while gaming-music or videos streaming in the background, plus a few guides or wiki pages. To test RAM usage, we opened three tabs with the same pages across all browsers: a YouTube video playing at 480p, and the home pages of two news websites with various videos, images, and ads. It’s common when switching browsers that the new one feels significantly faster, but the difference can simply be that your thousands of history entries, bookmarks, and extensions haven’t been moved to the new application. Importantly, each browser was tested with a clean user profile-no synced data, no extensions running, and so on. The testing was performed on a PC with a R圜PU, an Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics card, 16GB RAM, and Windows 10 Pro build 2004. We used three web-based benchmarks for testing performance: JetStream 2 (opens in new tab) (a JavaScript and WebAssembly benchmark), MotionMark (opens in new tab) (a graphics test), and Speedometer 2 (opens in new tab) (a benchmark for typical web apps). It also needs to do, well, browser things. Ideally, the best browser in this scenario should load pages and content quickly, while also not slowing down any games that might be running at the same time. The most important factor here is performance: not only how fast a web browser is on your PC, but also how resource-efficient it is.

The browser is only available for Windows, and you can download it from its official website (opens in new tab). Opera GX supports synchronization with other Opera browsers, so you could also use the company’s other software for regular browsing/productivity, and only open GX when you need the gaming features. The limiters for RAM, network bandwidth, and CPU are great to have.

The interface isn’t for everyone-it honestly looks like a BIOS from a gaming motherboard-but Opera GX is a good browser for checking information or streaming music while you have a game open. Opera’s gaming-focused browser, Opera GX, gets an honorary mention here. (Image credit: Future) The runner-up: Opera GX

Gaming browser opera