iEntry 10th Anniversary
LinuxHaxor
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MHBrowser Speed Test Revisited: Webkit Still The Best And Rips Opera 10 Alpha A New One
In my last browser test I was criticized, and rightly so, for running browser on different OS and compare results. The argument was that some browsers perform better than others on certain OS, regardless of the hardware. The assessment is right I have seen webkit powered browsers perform ~25% faster on Mac OS X, while Firefox nightly is ruthless on a linux distro. So in this round we added two more browsers and tested all of them natively in windows and as expected Firefox Minefield performed poorly.
Machine and OS used?
Intel Core 2 Quad q6600 @ 2.40GHz with Windows Vista SP2 v.113 Build 6002 (Screenshot).
Why Javascript and why Sunspider Benchmark?
To some estimate javascript is used in more than 2/3 of the websites out there and Sunspider is the most comprehensive javascript benchmark test with the most real-life testing conditions. (read info).
Why it matters?
It doesn’t matter if your web use is limited to watching babies laugh in youtube; but as more and more application are getting web-based; heavy users, like yours truly, are spending increasingly more time on web-based applications. Which was one of the reasons behind the release of open-source Chrome by Google, “To make the web a bit faster” and why developers are spending more time trying to get every bit of juice out of their javascipt engine like “V8 for Chrome”, “SpiderMonkey for Firefox”, “SquirrelFish for Webkit” and “futhark for Opera 10 Alpha” (with presto 2.2 Rendering engine).
The Result.
As expected, open source webkit engine is still quite a few steps ahead of its nearest competitor and winner of this benchmark. Unfortunately we couldn’t use the latest build of webkit as it was only available for OS X; yes we could have used the source and compile it - but not knowing which compiler and which optimization options were used (yes it matters!) to get the fastest build; we decided not to take the chance. Either way Webkit won so it doesn’t matter.
Firefox performs really bad under windows compare to both OS X and Linux based distros. So as expected Chrome performed better in its home turf, to make matters worse the latest nightly build of chrome (5.155) actually performs quite a bit better than the previously tested version (4.154).
Opera took more than double the time of webkit to finish this benchmark, not to be left behind; IE 8 Beta 2 took double the time of Opera to finish the benchmark.
Standings and benchmark time:
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WebKit r39088 finished in 1309.6 ms
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Chrome 6528 (0.5.155.0) finished in 1375.2 ms
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Firefox 3.2a1pre finished in 1725.6 ms
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Opera 10 Alpha 1139 finished in 4148.4 ms
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IE8 Beta 2 build 18241 finished in 8427 ms
(Update: Firefox 3.1b2 which was released a few hours after this post finished the test in 1676.8 ms - a bit faster than the earlier build. )
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can you test out the tracemonkey builds?
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tinderbox-builds/tracemonkey-win32/
Yeah, give it a go.
Let me know when webkit comes out for something other than windows or osx (e.g. linux)
otherwise all this open source branding is just bullshit if you need a closed source OS to run it
@mark
WebKit has been buildable on linux for a long time… just as long as it has for windows (actually, longer if you count KHTML). Try checking out the source code some time, im pretty sure there are linux build instructions included and a list of required libraries.
Also, you clearly don’t know your browser engine history. WebKit is based on KHTML, the web engine used by Konquerer in KDE environments. Linux KDE environments. So to sum it all up, WebKit has “been out” for linux since even before Apple was using it.
But webkit (and sometimes opera) are usually broken in subtle and beautiful ways when you get to code which really stretches DOM manipulation.
e.g. Google’s Chrome version of webkit barfs if you try and access dl/dt elements via the DOM; and Safari has been my bane for a number of months with it’s weird little buglets.
I’m not saying IE is perfect - far from it - but comparing browsers you just need to check that they actually work in the real world!
@mark WebKit is out for Linux:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en-us&q=webkit+linux&btnG=Search
Interesting to always compare speed. For a start I always feel that Opera is faster the FireFox or Chrome. To top it off it has more options that I want and help me browse quickly and efficiently.
Lets also compare features and usefulness…
I personally would need far more than a few speed related reasons to swithc from Opera mainly because most of my time isn’t spent downloading or watching flash and javaScript intensive sites intensive sites. (Oh yeah thats because I hate flash and block it until I want it and have JavaScript disabled until I need it)…
But then I also browse without pictures.
The WebKit engine is used on Linux by, e.g., Midori, and can also be used in Epiphany (I believe that will be the default in the future), and a quick search in Synaptic turned up Arora and Kazehakase as well.
This is laughable. WebKit “rips Opera a new one”? Talk about biased. Never mind the fact that WebKit was designed specifically to run this test well. Never mind the fact that Opera is faster in real-world scenarios.
There are some weird comments here too:
“webkit (and sometimes opera) are usually broken in subtle and beautiful ways when you get to code which really stretches DOM manipulation”
That’s because you tweak your code to match some other browser’s bugs first. You blame WebKit for your own poor code.
Fanboyism… sigh.
You must be doing it wrong James, I’ve experienced very few problems with Safari at all.
I’m guessing your some sort of drag and drop !!!!!ENTERPRISE!!!!! IDE developer
Interesting test. However I personally don’t agree with it.
I use Opera, and I mean I use almost all it’s features. I use it for web, mail, rss/atom feeds,notes, chat, widgets. It has some so unique features (speeddial, online synchronisation of different things, inline search etc.etc.) I can’t give up using it.
If you use any of the other browsers presented above in an office environment you also need a mail client, a fast editing tool (notepad or other) for notes, an IRC client and sometimes a Torrent client … I’m convinced that all of those started at the same time would make a much bigger hug on your system than opera does. And I didn’t mentioned the builtin developer tools for web developers, very useful for debugging sites (one more application you should need to start) … only count those 5-7 programs in your taskbar, and they are already disturb you … so, for me, Opera is the best, and 10 alpha promises some great new features.
You may like heavy javascript, I don’t. See how Webkit stacks up to Opera in using the next generation XML graphic file format of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Do so at my site:
http://deerring.com
James
I don’t understand why everybody has to test only pure JavaScript performance. Are you using that much JavaScript in your every day browsing?
The thing that makes sense is to test a big bunch of normal, popular web pages a lot of times. Now, who can make that test for us?!
Nightly builds of WebKit are available from http://nightly.webkit.org/, which are usable with Safari on OSX and Windows. There is a source tarball provided which can be used to build WebKit for either Gtk+ or Qt on Linux using the command `WebKitTools/Scripts/build-webkit –release`.
“For a start I always feel that Opera is faster the FireFox or Chrome.”
I feel the same and found out it is mostly a matter of default settings which are set for a smooth experience in opera. After an evening of tweaking firefox I achieved a somewhat similar feel. Still I prefer opera to firefox for obvious reasons.
“I don’t understand why everybody has to test only pure JavaScript performance. Are you using that much JavaScript in your every day browsing?”
I second that. I simply disable javascript by default and only enable it manually on a few sites I know and use. Javascript is slowing my browsing, used and abused in so many ways from spyware to exploit, it is recommended by the ff since 2002 to turn it off to protect yourself and your own privacy.
Also, there’s no real point in comparing alpha pre-releases which are likely to change a lot before actual public release.
That said, it would be nice to have an entry for khtml for the sake of comparison with webkit.
why not try new seamonkey from mozilla
Interesting test. However I personally don’t agree with it…
The WebKit engine is used on Linux by, e.g., Midori, and can also be used in Epiphany (I believe that will be the default in the future), and a quick search in Synaptic turned up Arora and Kazehakase as well..
I don’t understand why everybody has to test only pure JavaScript performance. Are you using that much JavaScript in your every day browsing?
The thing that makes sense is to test a big bunch of normal, popular web pages a lot of times. Now, who can make that test for us?!.
I find these kinds of tests overrated, I use Opera, FF,
and WebKit. In real life surfing opera is the fastest
on my machine. I have a Mac and pc.
Hi. I personally prefer Opera. It seems to always run the fastest. For some reason thought certain sites don’t think that it is a valid browser. Oh well.