I discovered the SunSpider benchmark through a Jeff Atwood’s post on the same topic where he has given the JavaScript performance comparison for different browsers. His list do not include the browser betas though. Since I’ve been trying out Firefox 3 beta, and it seems a lot snappier than version 2, I decided to give it a try. To make things interesting, I also tried out the benchmark on the other browsers I had – Opera 9.20 (not the latest), Flock 1.0.3 (which is based on Firefox 2) and IE7.

I ran the benchmark once each on the browsers. My system configuration is as follows:

• Pentium 4 2.8 GHz
• 2 GB RAM
• Windows XP Professional with SP2

Do note that I did not create any special setup for the browsers, i.e., they had their plugins and extensions enabled. This might have affected the performance, but then again it also simulates more of a real world scenario.

Results (links lead to results on SunSpider page – complete results in this Google spreadsheet)

Observations

The benchmark result shows that there have indeed been significant improvements in Firefox 3 over 2, with an overall gain of over 50%, and the performance is close to that of Opera. There are tests where Firefox trumps Opera, but overall Opera still has the lead. However, there seems to be some downsides to the Firefox 3 optimizations at least as of beta 2, as the rich interfaces of Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail do not work.

The other important observation is that Flock is significantly faster than Firefox despite being based on the Firefox 2 code. The Flock developers have definitely optimised the code, and this shows. (Update: not sure about this, based on Mike Shaver’s comment below, and my own observations on a different PC)

As for IE7, it actually performs reasonably well, and is on par with or better than Firefox for a majority of the tests (also shown by Jeff Atwood). However, the string tests turns out to be IE7’s Achilles heel with the time taken (72347.8 ms) being 10-15x that of the other browsers.

I haven’t tried out the benchmark on Opera 9.5 (still in beta) yet, and there may be further optimizations there too. Safari was also pretty fast as per Jeff Atwood’s post. I hope to test out these two browsers as well, and possibly on other systems to see how much the system configuration affects the results.

Check out the detailed results in this Google spreadsheet (Firefox 3 seems to have problems with Google Docs – it was only showing the all documents page).

Update: Based on Mike Shaver’s suggestion (comment no.1) I tried out the tests for Firefox 2 and Flock on a different PC (Athlon 64 3200+, 1 GB RAM), both in safe mode and with extensions enabled, and found the results to be similar (FF2 is slightly faster this time). I hope to do more tests, and in the mean time if you have any results or observations to share you are welcome to share them.

29638.0

28338.0

30496.4

29098.6