Mozilla Unleashes the Kraken

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released the first version a new browser benchmark called Kraken. Mozilla's Robert Sayre writes on his blog, 'More than Sunspider, V8, and Dromaeo, Kraken focuses on realistic workloads and forward-looking applications. We believe that the benchmarks used in Kraken are better in terms of reflecting realistic workloads for pushing the edge of browser performance forward. These are the things that people are saying are too slow to do with open web technologies today, and we want to have benchmarks that reflect progress against making these near-future apps universally available.' On my somewhat elderly x86_64 Linux system Google Chrome 6.0.472.55 beta completes the Kraken benchmark in 28638.1 milliseconds, Opera 10.62 completes it in 23612.4 milliseconds, and the current Firefox 4 nightly build completes it in 19897.5 milliseconds."

Comments

I hope that Firefox isn't playing Microsoft's game

[Chrisq]

ways suspicious when someone releases a benchmark that shows that their software is better than others, especially when other benchmarks have shown FF as slower than Chrome or Opera. I hope this isn't one of those M$ style tests that find the bits that their own software does well and others badly and test that.

Re:Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

The scary bit is that the world is quickly moving in a direction where serious desktop applications will be written in... Javascript.

So much for Java, .NET ; as soon as its possible to earn money through the Google App store for your Web app there will be a torrent of these applications being release to the world.

The web browser is the new platform.

It feels like going back 20 years in time.

The circle is now complete!

[Jugalator]

Google wins in their test! (that curiously heavily exploit recursion and other good parts of the V8 engine)

Microsoft wins in their tests! (that curiously heavily test only DirectX acceleration)

... and now, Firefox wins in their test! (which has yet to be disassembled to reveal how they dodge Opera and Chrome from winning, when they use to in all others, including independent tests like Peacekeeper)

Re:I hope that Firefox isn't playing Microsoft's g

[Grismar]

Have you considered that it may well be the other way around?

If Mozilla, Google, MS, Apple or whoever truly believe that those particular aspects of a browser are the most important, doesn't it make sense that they would optimize their browsers for those aspects? I think it makes sense that they would write tests for the exact same aspects that they have been optimizing their browsers for, -because- they believe these are the key aspects.

Lacking an objective measure, all you can do right now is decide with whom you agree the most and probably use their browser or another browser that ranks well on their test - if these benchmarks are a critical decision factor for you.