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...

Fix : Location.href not working in IE 6

We recently tried to do a post back of a page based on a user input in a text box, the postback will be triggered by a ASP LinkButton. ASP Linkbutton renders as an anchor tag with the href populated with javascript:WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions. So the challenge is to set the window.location to the javascript:WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions

window.location= javascript:WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions .. . ..

The location can be a URL too, in our case it is just a post back script

It works like a charm in IE 8 but it doesn't even show a sign in IE 6. We tried many variations window.location=, window.location.href= ,window.location.href.assign but nothing worked out.

After few hours of googling and surfing the web we found that we need to add the following line to get it worked in IE 6

window.event.returnValue=false;

At last the final code looked like this

if (evt.keyCode == 13)
{
window.event.returnValue = false;
window.location = 'http://www.google.com";
return false;
}

hope this helps someone .. .

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 :-)

Querystring limitation in Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer browser is having a nasty limitation on URL length in its address bar, it cannot contain more than 2083 characters, It will trim the string whatever comes after position 2083. This applies from IE 4.0 to IE 7.0.

This limitation is only for HTTP GET request not on HTTP POST request

On the other hand Firefox 3.0 allowed me to paste >2,40,000 chars. So developers beware of IE while passing lengthy query strings from your web application, your code has a chance of failing on browser compatibility testing.

Keep in mind that the number of characters will be significantly reduced if you have special characters (e.g. spaces) that need to be URLEncoded (e.g. converted to the sequence '%20'). For every space, you reduce the size allowed in the remainder of the URL by 2 characters - and this holds true for many other special characters that you may encode before sending the URL to the client.

MSFT KB Article : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q208427/