SunSpider etc.

A while ago, in response to someone commenting about Opera being faster than Firefox I posted this, among others, based on my own testing:

(Results are from the Sunspider JS benchmark. Opera 9.60, Chrome 0.2.149.30, Firefox nightly is from the 17th October 2008)

Before anyone points it out, I get that there are issues comparing an Fx3.1-ish nightly with a release version of Opera but

  1. There was no “nightly”/pre-release version of Opera that I could find, at the time
  2. Even if you compare to Fx 3.0.3, Opera 9.60 takes~1.33 times longer to finish the test

Anyhoo, out of interest I reran the tests adding Firefox 3.0.6 and the latest Firefox trunk nightly, Chrome 2.0.160.0 and Webkit’s 40471 nightly.

I can’t be bothered testing IE because a) it would take too long and b) I wouldn’t get comparable numbers, because the machine I ran all of these on only has IE6 and it’s too much hassle upgrading and downgrading and sidegrading. The general trend (from messing about with it on Windows 7 and Vista on other machines) I’ve observed is that each new version is faster than its predecessor and IE8 more so than IE7.

SunSpider

TM = TraceMonkey, the new bit to Firefox 3.1’s JS engine. For the purposes of this, I set javascript.options.jit.content = true for TM, and false otherwise. True is now the default.

Obviously Sunspider isn’t representative of, well, anything (Dromaeo tests DOM manipulation too, and there are loads of benchmarks around, some more useful than others) but it’s interesting to see (I guess) that the general trend is for things to get faster…