What To Expect From Browser Javascript Speed
I decided to check out the various browser speeds this morning to get an idea of what to expect from future web applications.
My goal is to see how much faster new browsers will be compared to what I currently use (Safari for browsing, Firefox for development).
Things are looking really good.
The data
| Browser | Milliseconds |
|---|---|
| Safari (WebKit Nightly) | 832.4 |
| Firefox 3.1 with TraceMonkey | 1,690.8 |
| Firefox 3.1 | 2,738.0 |
| Stainless 0.1.5 | 3,321.2 |
| Safari 3.1.2 | 6,707.2 |
| Firefox 3.0.3 | 8,998.6 |
This means that when I browse with Safari I can expect 8 times faster Javascript in web apps!
All tests were done on an iMac running OS X 10.5.5 on 2.4GHz Intel Core Duo with 3 GB 800Mhz DDR2 SDRAM.
on October 4th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Any chance you could throw up an MSIE number as a relative comparison? Many people would benefit from understanding the real difference between MSIE and a modern browser.
on October 4th, 2008 at 11:39 am
The following benchmarks are from browsers running under Parallels so it isn’t a fair comparison to the times we see in the original post.
That being said and to give you an idea I downloaded the latest nightly of FF for Windows and installed it in Windows to give us some frame of reference. Virtualization does lots of magic though and I wouldn’t be surprised if the results would be wildly different if we ran it on Windows XP SP2 natively.
That being said the results for Firefox are quite similar in Parallels as they are native on OS X.
Here are the numbers.
FF3.1b with Tracemonkey 1607.0ms
FF3.1b 2770.4ms
Chrome0.2.149.30 1709.8ms
IE8.0.6001.18241 Beta 8610.2ms
IE7.0.5730.19 42365.4ms 0_o !!!!!
I had to run the test in Internet Explorer 7 twice because I couldn’t believe how slow it was. I imagine it would run faster if I ran it natively, although the Firefox results are pretty close to the native OS X ones even though for this comparison I ran it through Parallels.
If the difference between native and OS X is a small as FF tests run in both environment suggests Internet Explorer 8 will be as fast as the old generation of Firefox browsers.
Which means that Internet Explorer 8 seems to be about 6 times slower than Firefox with TraceMonkey enabled will be. Pathetic.
on October 4th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Yes, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 have very similar JScript implementations. Which means that web applications will still need some kind of slow fallback mode until people move to IE8.