Yet Another Browser Benchmark

Over the last year or so I've periodically checked in on the Javascript performance of the leading non-IE browsers. Despite the tedious nature of this task, what keeps me coming back are the repeated claims from each team touting their product as the best. Claims like this intrigue me since it is almost never possible to crown one product "the best". The comparison just isn't that simple.

Most recently, both Firefox (here) and Opera (here) have been featured in Slashdot posts mentioning how great their latest bleeding edge development versions are. So I figured I'd give them all a whirl. The results are here.

For this comparison I used nightly builds of Firefox and Webkit from 12/22/2009, which is the date the Opera 10.5 pre-Alpha was released. Unfortunately I could not go back in time and grab the latest Chrome development release from that date. So its possible that Chrome has a slight advantage in this comparison.

In the chart, a red box indicates that browser's score was worst or tied for worst. A green box indicates that browser's score was best or tied for best. Some comments on the results:

1. Firefox does a few things well, but overall lags far behind the other options. It turned in the worst overall score in Sunspider, V8 and Dromaeo, all by a significant margin. All four were roughly tied in Peacekeeper. More on that later, though.

2. The new Opera release really is pretty wicked fast. Color me surprised. Not only are the Javascript results speedy, its noticeably smoother in the graphical rendering tests in Peacekeeper. Unfortunately it fails to integrate well into Windows XP from a UI perspective. I'm guessing it would look better under Vista/Win7.

3. The V8 benchmark is very, very fishy. It vastly favors Chrome, which isn't that surprising since it is what was used to tune Chrome's Javascript engine, but it also extremely harsh on Firefox relative to Webkit and Opera.

4. Opera is doing something fishy with regexps on Dromaeo. Most likely caching results. Its score is an order of magnitude higher than the other browsers on that particular test, while being only moderately faster on the others.

5. Though not strictly a Javascript benchmark, Peacekeeper gives some fascinating results once you delve down into the individual tests. Despite all four browsers earning approximately the same overall score, results vary greatly from test to test. Opera does especially well on "Complex Graphics" whereas Webkit does especially poorly. Firefox does especially well on "Data" whereas Chrome and Opera do especially poorly. Chrome, and to a lesser extent Webkit, do especially well on "DOM Operations" and "Text Parsing".

6. Every browser had at least one area where it was the "worst" among the four options, and each browser had at least one area where it was the "best". This suggests there is at least some low hanging fruit left for each of them to pick, though less so for Opera.

7. All tests were performed on a 1.8ghz Pentium-M running Windows XP SP3 with 1GB RAM and Intel integrated graphics. This processor has SSE2 instructions, so Opera's performance shouldn't be negatively impacted.