Benchmarking the browser speed again

I did the browser speed test for all my browsers using SunSpider JavaScript way back in 2008 . When I installed IE 9 beta and after hearing all the "Beautiful web" marketing fundas from Microsoft, I was tempted to run the SunSpider script on IE 9 beta and other available counter parts.

Browser name	SunSpider(ms)	V8(ms)
Firefox 4.0b7	1416	583
Safari 5.0.2	1565	474
IE  9.0.7904	2143	337
Opera 10.63	1660	534
Chrome 8.0 beta	1984	1305
Firefox 3.6.10	3571	64.1

All tests were executed on Intel Dual core P8600 2.40 Ghz processor with 4 GB RAM in place.Results of Sun spider JavaScript in graph format below. Shorter is good.

There are also other alternatives available for benchmarking the abilities of a browser Google V8 benchmark suite and Mozilla Kraken. As Mozilla Kraken is based on Sun Spider and too young let us not consider for this benchmark.

Results of browsers on Google V8 benchmark suite v6 is (longer is good)

As Google considers its V8 benchmark suite v6 for its tuning purpose, it outperforms others pretty good.

Firefox 4.0 beta powered by Jager Monkey performs better than its predecessor Trace monkey(Firefox 3.6), Apple Safari's Nitro engine, Opera's Carakan & IE 9's the new Chakra engine.

Even though there is no significant change in Chrome's V8 engine, it still gives tough to other contenders. The most notable point is the Microsoft's transition  from Internet Explorer 8 to 9. MSFT changed the JavaScript engine, compatible with HTML 5, slick tear of tabs(like chrome), new tab page and new download manager(like Mozilla).

way to go Microsoft, but miles to go...

First look at Google Chrome's Frame

Are you willing to use Google chrome you don't have privileges to install the new browser. There might be the IT department which may block installing new applications. You might be a SharePoint guy using IE heavily for development related works and also using Google apps like Gmail, Google reader etc for personal things Are you one of them. Google comes up with Chrome Frame

There's a way to leverage Chrome's state-of-the art rendering engine within Internet explorer without installing Google Chrome. Again Google leverages the existing capability to give more comfort to its users just like what happened for XmlHttp object.

Google developed a IE plugin/addon to replace Microsoft's traditional Trident layout engine with Chrome's layout engine based upon Webkit. You can call this Chrome layout by adding the prefix of cf: before any url. For eg:- Google home page will be cf:http://www.google.co.in/

So as a web developer do you want to use the feature of Chrome which is not present in IE(for eg Canvas tags). You just need to add the following meta tag to you code

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

Google provides a Javascript code snippet to detect whether Chrome frame exists or not,if not then it will prompt the users to install the plugin

Google's Search home page in Frame

Google Frame's About page


This Frame project is still in its early stages so expect some buggy things too. Let's see how Microsoft handles this plugin in future.

Browser Speed test . . . .

I did few benchmark for all my browsers on my desktop to just check who is fast,faster, fastest using SunSpider JavaScript. Ok let's see the stats

Google Chrome	1757.6 ms
FireFox 3.0	3695.8ms
Apple Safari 3.1	5021.2 ms
Opera 9.50	5237.2 ms
Opera 9.62	4681.0 ms
Microsoft IE 7.0	36744.6ms
Microsoft IE 6.0	60803.8ms

Obviously Google chrome is the front runner and we are expecting more in Microsoft IE 8 because the results of IE 7 and IE 6 soars. If you look at the stats you can notice Opera improves a lot in its latest 9.62.

Want to test your browser how fast it is ? Here you go
http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-driver.html

Who ever wins or loses , the end user is surely getting the best out of the market :-)