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:

1. WebKit r39088 finished in 1309.6 ms
2. Chrome 6528 (0.5.155.0) finished in 1375.2 ms
3. Firefox 3.2a1pre finished in 1725.6 ms
4. Opera 10 Alpha 1139 finished in 4148.4 ms
5. 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. )