As the official release of Firefox 3 is getting closer, with Release Candidate 1 being available since May 17th, I decided to boldly go where codinghorror has gone before and do a quick-and-dirty Javascript-performance comparison of the different browsers I’ve got installed on my Dell Latitude D620 laptop, using Webkit’s Sunspider benchmark.
Let’s start with the results for the browsers on my Windows XP SP2 installation, ordered from slowest to fastest. Each test was executed 2 times, clicking on the results will teleport you to the detailed results where you can paste the URL’s of another test to compare.
- msie 6 (6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_qfe.070227-2300): 47203.0ms +/- 16.7% and 47882.2ms +/- 4.9%
- IE 7 (standalone version, see below): 44726.2ms +/- 4.1% and 42655.2ms +/- 5.0%
- firefox 2 (2.0.0.12): 26025.4ms +/- 4.5% and 25305.0ms +/- 1.1%
- opera 9.27: 14202.0ms +/- 1.0% and 14755.6ms +/- 2.4%
- opera 9.5 (b2, build 9945) produced a number of ‘NaN’s’, but is clearly faster then it’s predecessor
- safari 3.1 (build 525.13): 6759.0ms +/- 1.2% and 6750.8ms +/- 2.0%
- firefox 3 (rc1): 5830.4ms +/- 2.2% and 5765.8ms +/- 1.0%
The MSIE7-results are probably not entirely representative, as I use Tredosoft’s standalone IE7. This is a bit of a hack to have IE7 on my otherwise MSIE6-based system. Moreover my corporate Windows-installation is infested with crapware, notably McAfee OAS and Zonealarm seem to be slowing things down enormously. The codinghorror-tests indeed show significantly better results for this browser, although IE does have serious issues with string concatenation, which should be fixed in IE8.
On the same hardware, but booting in Ubuntu 8.04 (Linux) form my external USB HD (a.k.a. my ‘disktop‘), I got the following results:
- opera 9.27: 15343.2ms +/- 1.1% and 15499.4ms +/- 1.1%
- firefox 3 (rc1, official mozilla build): 5352.6ms +/- 1.1% and 5343.8ms +/- 0.6%
- firefox 3 (b5, included in ubuntu 8.04): 5195.2ms +/- 1.6% and 5240.2ms +/- 1.4%
- konqueror 4: not tested yet,
results will follow later todaycan’t get test to completely run, any KDE-user want to give this a try?
Firefox 3 RC1 seems slightly slower then b5, but maybe the Ubuntu-b5-version is compiled with optimizations? Firefox is also faster on Ubuntu, but the anti-virus-bloat is probably messing with our heads here (although Opera is slower on Linux, go figure).
The general conclusion however; Firefox 3 is a huge step forward as far Javascript-performance is concerned. Users of javascript-heavy web-applications such as Gmail, Google Reader, Zoho Office and Zimbra should benefit enormously from this. It would however be very interesting to perform similar tests with regards to ‘normal page rendering’ (html/css). Does anyone know of such benchmarks?
i had a quick irc-chat with alexander sack (ubuntu) and mike connor (mozilla) about the better results for hardy’s ff3b5 when compared to mozilla’s official ff3rc1 for linux. apperantly the ubuntu-builds are compiled with gcc 4.2.3 where the mozilla-builds still use gcc 4.1 and that would account for the differences.
on a side-note; the ubuntu-mozillateam is working on an ff3rc1-release that will be pushed to end-users automatically. according to asac: “the ffox and xul bits are ready, but we still need to transition some rdepends as it breaks ABI and translations”. so i guess i’ll continue to use the mozilla RC1 for now.
The current development tree of Konqueror (or better: its components KHTML and KJS) have seen a lot of improvements lately.
Read more about the performance improvements in KJS: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3476
At this moment, it is only 1.77x slower than Firefox 3rc1.