Google has a test suite they use for testing performance of their V8 JavaScript rendering engine for Google Chrome. The page runs a suite of JavaScript tests, each of which are given a rating based on their performance. The average of the scores is used to give an overall measure of how fast the browser executes JavaScript.
The results were very surprising: Google Chrome outperformed Firefox by an order of magnitude (with a score almost 10 times as high). Safari’s score was about half that of Chrome, but still 5x faster than Firefox. Most surprising was Opera 10.10: its score was half that of Firefox, meaning Chrome executes JavaScript 20 times faster than Opera. Surprising, because Opera has long had a reputation as one of the fastest browsers, especially when it comes to JavaScript.
Just for fun, we also tested some more obscure browsers. We tested Flock 2.5.5, which is based on Firefox 3.0 but adds many extensions for social networking. This scored much lower than Firefox 3.6 — there has been improvement in Firefox’s execution speed over time, even though it doesn’t compare to Safari or Chrome on the Mac.
These are my results, running on a 2.66 Ghz Core 2 iMac:
(higher scores are better)
Google Chrome: 4843
WebKit Nightly Build: 3153
Safari 4.0.4: 2455
Firefox 3.6: 444
Flock 2.5.5: 191
Opera 10.10: 185
Based on the WebKit nightly build results, it looks as though future versions of Safari will close the speed gap with Chrome. Firefox’s results, however, are disappointing. Since V8 and all of Chrome is open source, however, we might see the Mozilla project incorporate it in future releases — the speed benefits are undeniable.
JavaScript execution speed has increased almost a hundredfold over the past decade; Google’s focus on V8 will continue to drive this increase.
You can run the tests yourself at this site. Feel free to post your results!
