A Modest Construct

Posts tagged `browsers`

¶ Yet more Javascript benchmarks

Every so often, it’s nice to take a look at the state of Javascript performance among the various browsers. Though misleading, it’s become something of a truism that “browser performance” is just a nice euphemism for “Javascript performance,” since any website doing anything interesting is basically leveraging Javascript to do it.

What’s come up since the last time I did any sort of Javascript performance comparison? Well, Google Chrome and its JS engine (“V8″), for one. Also, something of a new era in Javascript handling that attempts to optimize how browsers handle it by converting it to bytecode (or, in the case of JavaScriptCore/Squirrelfish Extreme/Nitro, directly to native machine code). In addition, there’s been some new benchmarks arrive on the scene, which allows us to tease out bias from any particular one.

It’s amazing, really, to compare these numbers against the linked benchmark from a mere 1.5 years ago. Opera went from being the top of the heap with 9.5 to being a lazy 3rd or 4th place. And Chrome, of course, decimated the competition (so far). Read on for the testing methodology and the results.

§3846 · June 21, 2009 · (No comments) · Tags: benchmarks, browsers, Firefox, javascript

¶ Javascript performance is about to get turbo-charged

Internet Explorer

Firefox

Safari

I personally think the friendly rivalry between the open-source Webkit engine (which powers Safari, among other things) and Mozilla (the Gecko engine, actually) is one of the best things to happen to browser development in years. The constant one-upsmanship can only lead to better browsers. Well, Internet Explorer will constantly be the limiting factor, but we can dream, can’t we?

The latest thing to hit browser source repos is javascript engine improvement based on something called “trace trees”: essentially, javascript gets translated into native bytecode. The Webkit engine made the announcement a few months ago, with code codenamed “Squirrelfish,” promising massive improvements. That article’s also got a pretty good writeup.

Open Source being what it is, it was only a matter of time before Mozilla announced their own version of a trace-tree-based javascript engine. John Resig has a good writeup, as done Brendan Eich.

§2305 · August 24, 2008 · 4 comments · Tags: browsers, Firefox, Internet Explorer, javascript, open source, Safari, software, technology, Web 2.0, Webkit

¶ Javascript engines in 32-bit and 64-bit browsers

I recently performed some cursory Javascript benchmarks with the new version of Firefox and Safari; curious about performance, I decided to do some testing of 32-bit browsers against their 64-bit counterparts. On Windows Vista x64, the only two browsers so available to me are Internet Explorer 7 and a recent nightly build of Firefox 3. The 64-bit comes from the Mozilla x86-64 project, specifically the build from 21 March 2008. The 32-bit build is a proper nightly from the same date from the official Mozilla FTP.

My hypothesis, before performing the tests, was that the 64-bit compilation would have little or no effect on the Javascript engine performance. It’s so difficult to optimize Javascript rendering, which is inherently single-threaded, and it seems likely to only benefit from a faster CPU clock than bigger memory registers. Afterward, I felt vindicated: Internet Explorer is likely the best test, and the difference was not statistically significant. In Firefox’s case, the 64-bit build was actually significantly worse, though this could easily be due to some other factor I have not taken into account; I have assumed that the source was compiled on the same date. See below for more details.

§2017 · March 23, 2008 · 6 comments · Tags: benchmarks, browsers, Firefox, Internet Explorer, javascript, open source

¶ Firefox 3.0b4 vs. 2.0.0.12 Javascript benchmark

Mozilla Firefox

Continuing the tradition of my previous post about Safari, I thought I would revisit Firefox’s performance on the SunSpider benchmark.

Clearly, Firefox has also made drastic strides in its Javascript engine, which is an entirely new piece donated by Adobe (and is the same engine, or so I understand, which powers the Actionscript interpreter of Flash). These results put the new Firefox 3 beta at four times the speed of the latest 2.x series. The newly released Safari/Webkit build narrowly outperforms the latest test build of Firefox, but clearly there’s a lot of progress being made (and perhaps more before its final release).

The tests were done on a Windows XP SP2 machine; it has a Pentium 4 and 2GB of RAM.

§2012 · March 19, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: benchmarks, browsers, Firefox, open source, software

¶ Safari 3.04 vs 3.1 Javascript benchmarks

Safari

Safari 3.1 has been released, bringing with it all the latest and great Webkit code. Even though the UI still sucks (at least on Windows; ever hear of native GUIs, Apple?)

I decided to benchmark the Javascript performance of the new Safari against its more immediate predecessor, 3.04. This testing was done on a Windows XP SP2 installation; a HP workstation with a Pentium 4 and 2GB of RAM.

As you can see in the table below, the JS engine has improved considerably since the last build, cutting the total time by more than half.

§2011 · March 18, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: Apple, benchmarks, browsers, javascript, open source, Safari, software, Webkit