How Do Browsers Scale?

An anonymous reader writes "Benchmarking browsers is a somewhat silly exercise, since scores cannot be replicated on a variety of hardware, and it is not uncommon for even the same system to fail to replicate benchmarks scores, especially in JavaScript tests in two succeeding runs. The guys over at ConceivablyTech have an interesting approach, running browsers through multiple tests on different sets of hardware (including an Android smartphone), and showing the scaling differences between browsers when you are using a dual-core netbook on the low-end and a six-core desktop on the high-end. They also tested HTML5 on Firefox mobile and found the browser has better HTML5 support than the current Firefox 4 Beta 6."

Comments

Thrash for several hours before benchmarking

[Mandrel]

I find that Firefox gradually slows down with use, requiring me to re-start it at least once per day to avoid second-or-more delays when scrolling or typing.

So I'd like to see benchmarks that test a browser's speed after several hours of simulated use, benchmarking while many other windows and tabs are open. This can also be done in several different memory-restricted VMs to see how the amount of memory affects the speed.

Perhaps my problem is due to one or more of the plug-ins I use. So Mozilla should make it easy for plugin developers to test their releases on a benchmark like the one described above.

Re:Dual core netbook is low-end?

[sznupi]

"Cool"?...simply normal. And no reason for jokes.

There's a lot of perfectly fine older machines out there, making sure how well the browsers "scale down" would be much more worthwhile than swapping one fast setup for another ridiculously fast setup, with a few more factors than claimed "number of cores" and comparing each browser only to itself.