Now that we can get out hands on the new Firefox 8, it's time to redo the The BIG browser benchmark!
BIG browser benchmark is simple - we take the leading browsers and pit them against four of the toughest benchmark tests available to see which is the tortoise, and which is the hare.
[UPDATE: Updated to add Firefox 8.0.1 and Opera 11.60, which throw up identical results to previous versions.]
Five browsers are in the running:
Note: The performance of the 64-bit version of IE 9 is so abysmal that I didn't bother with it this time. If you want an idea of how bad it is, check out the tests I ran back in March of this year.
And here are the tests that the browsers will face:
All testing carried out on a Windows 7 64-bit machine running a Q9300 2.5GHz quad-core processor with 4GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 260 graphics card.
SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark -->
Results from March 2011 available here.
V8 Benchmark -->
Results from March 2011 available here.
Results from March 2011 available here.
Kraken Benchmark -->
Results from March 2011 available here.
Conclusion-->
Other tests are more clear cut. Chrome 15 was the clear winner of the V8 benchmark test (bear in mind that the V8 is a Google benchmark). Chrome 15 also wiped the floor with the competition in the Kraken 1.1 test too, being nearly twice as fast as the nearest rival Firefox 8 (which itself was almost twice as fast as its nearest rival).
So, what's the bottom line? Looking at the data, and combining this with real-world usage, I really don’t think that JavaScript performance is an issue any more. In real-world testing it’s almost impossible to see a difference between the browsers (some HTML 5 sites not withstanding, given that many are optimized for a particular browser). In fact, unless one of the players managed to boost JavaScript performance by an order of magnitude, shaving a few milliseconds off here and there hardly matters any more.
Also, given how well IE 9 performed in these tests, sticking with the default browser that comes with Windows no longer gives you an inferior web experience.
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