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.
