We already knew that Firefox nightly beats Chrome in speed, the gap is getting wider with the latest Firefox builds (3.2a1pre). While Google Chrome uses webkit as a layout engine it uses it’s own javascript engine called V8. On the other hand webkit developers are quietly tweaking away its SquirrelFish engine for javascript speed increase.

Contestants:

• Google Chrome 0.4.154.29 running native on Windows Vista. Finished SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark in 1554.2 ms.




• Firefox Minefield 3.2a1pre running native on Ubuntu. Finished SunSpider in 1299.2 ms.




• Webkit nightly r38860, the latest build is only available on Mac OS X. Finished SunSpider in 1048.8ms.

While there will always be fanboys who prefer one browser over another (where the hell is my Opera on webkit?) – the one thing that we can agree on is that its a winning situation for everyone as all these rendering engines, javascript engines and, in the case of Chrome and Firefox, browsers are open source. The one with the largest browser market share is not anywhere close in terms of speed or standard compliance. Their dominance in market share will too not last for long.

Update: Should have mentioned before. All used the same hardware, a macbook core 2 duo with separate installs of vista and Ubuntu with bootcamp along with OS X of course.