Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla release Speedometer 3.0 to test your browser
A screenshot of the Speedometer 3.0 web browser benchmarking tool
In 2014, Apple's WebKit team released Speedometer, and in 2018, partnered with Google's Chrome team to release Speedometer 2.0. The partnership's goal was to create a shared understanding of web performance so that the teams behind the engines could make improvements to enhance their respective browsers' user experience.
With the release of Speedometer 3.0 today, the collaboration has grown once again to also include Microsoft, which makes the Edge browser, and Mozilla, which makes the Firefox browser. The companies selected the tests and workloads their teams believe are critical to understanding and improving the browsing experience.
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A single test alone isn't enough to simulate the whole web. That's why this latest release is so important. According to the Speedometer 3.0 website, the tool runs the following tests: working with a to-do list (measuring the time to add, complete, and remove 100 items in a basic list), editing rich text (loading and styling text within WYSIWYG and code editors), rendering charts (loading and interacting with SVG and canvas charts), and reading a news website (navigating across webpages and interacting with a typical looking news website).
According to the test's methodology, the goal of all the workloads "is to represent a scenario that could be found on the web. Although all workloads strive to use patterns that are commonly used, some implementation details are Speedometer specific and should not be used as a guideline on how to implement and deploy a standalone app. For example, due to constraints within the test harness, workloads must not depend on a server infrastructure to function properly and are built as static files ahead of time."
The companies have been working on Speedometer 3.0 for more than a year. Firefox developer Brian Grinstead wrote that the collaboration with Apple and Google "fulfills the vision set out in December 2022 to bring experts across the industry together in order to rethink how we measure browser performance, guided by a shared goal to reflect the real-world Web as much as possible."
"This is the first time the Speedometer benchmark, or any major browser benchmark, has been developed through a cross-industry collaboration supported by each major browser engine: Blink, Gecko, and WebKit," Grinstead added. "Working together means we can build a shared understanding of what matters to optimize, and facilitates broad review of the benchmark itself: both of which make it a stronger lever for improving the Web as a whole."
As far as frameworks are concerned, Speedometer 3.0 takes into consideration React, Vue, Angular, Preact, Lit, Backbone, and Svelt.
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You can run the Speedometer 3.0 benchmark yourself by visiting the official site and clicking on Start Test. You'll see a number of random pages and actions appear as the test does its thing. When it concludes, Speedometer 3.0 will present you with a score.
In my tests, Opera on Pop!_OS Linux scored 22.1, Firefox scored 25.1, and Edge came in at 21.2. On MacOS, Safari clocked a score of 13.5.
Don't let those scores mislead you. Click on Details to view more information about your browser's test scores, where you'll see much higher scores, such as the following from Opera on Linux:
TodoMVC-JavaScript-ES5 55.17 ± 7.94 (14.4%) ms TodoMVC-JavaScript-ES6-Webpack-Complex-DOM 77.60 ± 8.51 (11.0%) ms TodoMVC-WebComponents 15.86 ± 2.95 (18.6%) ms TodoMVC-React-Complex-DOM 43.20 ± 3.04 (7.0%) ms TodoMVC-React-Redux 39.86 ± 1.39 (3.5%) ms TodoMVC-Backbone 27.43 ± 1.06 (3.9%) ms TodoMVC-Angular-Complex-DOM 42.63 ± 3.86 (9.1%) ms TodoMVC-Vue 22.90 ± 1.21 (5.3%) ms TodoMVC-jQuery 171.16 ± 21.28 (12.4%) ms TodoMVC-Preact-Complex-DOM 16.18 ± 0.57 (3.5%) ms
For more information on today's launch, read the four official blog posts on Speedometer 3.0 from Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft.