How fast can your browser run? - Take 2
TL:DR: Google Chrome has pulled ahead of Webkit in terms of JS speed and feature completeness, however, it hasn’t utilized the graphics card well enough on the Mac.
It’s been nearly five months since I last did one of these. In that time, Chrome has gone from v6 to v8, Webkit has had close to 10,000 commits, and Minefield has gotten even closer to being released as Firefox 4.
So I thought it was about time that I tested the latest versions of them again. This time around, I added a few additional tests. HTML 5 is quite a hot topic right now, so is rendering on the graphics card. So I’ve added a few tests for that, to see how each is faring.
Setup
I used the same computer as I did for the tests 5 months ago (a macbook, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 2GB or 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM).
Each test was run without any additional programs open, and only one instance/tab of the browser. Details about the individual tests can be found below.
Results
(1) Acid3 - Test was run five times, and the best result picked
(2) HTML 5 Test - Test was run once
(3) Sunspider - Test was run five times, and the best result picked
(4) V8 - Test was run five times, and the best result picked
(5) Fish Tank - Test was run once with one fish, and the lowest and highest frames per second recorded
(6) Speed Reading - Test was run once, and the frames per second and average draw time recorded.
(7) Colour Wheel - Test was run once, and the resulting rounds per minute recorded.
Conclusion
Google Chrome and Webkit are no longer tied for first place. Google Chrome has pulled away into the lead, taking first place in five of the seven tests. It has however, not been able to take first place in the Speed Reading and Colour Wheel tests (and infact, got the worst score).
Most browsers have full hardware rendering support on Windows, but when it comes to Mac, they haven’t all implemented support for it yet. Hopefully by the next time I do another of these tests, one of the browsers will have implemented Mac support for it.
Till then, if you’re looking for something super quick for rendering pages and script, Google Chrome takes the cake!
