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Comparing Browser JavaScript Performance

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the lining-'em-up dept.

Thwomp writes "Over at Coding Horror Jeff Atwood has an interesting writeup on JavaScript performance in the big four browsers. He used WebKit's newly announced SunSpider to produce the results. If a probable anomaly in the IE7 results is overlooked, Firefox 2 is the slowest of the bunch. Atwood has also benchmarked the latest Firefox Beta, and its performance seems to be improved significantly."

4 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. A grain of salt by pwnies · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Take note of the tests for the latest Firefox beta though, notice that he's using a different system with .2Ghz more and he's on a 64 bit system versus a 32 bit. Although it's not a huge leap, it IS a difference. Different system different benchmark.

  2. Re:Hmmm by jrumney · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The "probable anomaly" is that it is an order of magnitude slower than every other browser at string operations, which are a kind of important feature of Javascript. I'm not sure why he sees this as a probable anomaly, but not any other result where one browser does a lot worse than the others (no browser appears a clear winner or loser on everything, though Opera does come out in front more often than the others).

  3. The JIT compiler isn't in JavaScript yet. by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    FireFox was supposed to be getting a JIT compiler for JavaScript. It's the one from the Flash player, where it runs ActionScript. That's apparently now expected in 2008. Then we'll see some real improvement.

  4. It's Flash by CrazedWalrus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Firefox, for me, is really stable unless Flash is involved. Add Flash to the mix, and it goes down faster than a two dollar whore on a Friday night. By the way, so does Opera, but not quite as often. Close though. Just try watching 4-5 videos on YouTube.

    I think Flash is the biggest DoS in the history of the web and Adobe really needs to take a good look at it. With all of these Flash ads and Flash-based video players, it really is a critical issue. Using adblock is an absolute must in my book, just to keep the browser running. My bet is some sort of resource leakage, since it happens over time -- like when watching several YouTube videos. It doesn't crash on the first or second one, but you're courting disaster on the third and above.

    By the way, is there any way for FF to handle plugin crashes gracefully, i.e. *without* bringing down the browser with it? Maybe running it in a separate process somehow and just putting up a "broken image" sort of placeholder?