Firefox 3 Performance Numbers
Date : 2008 02 29 Category : Tech & Development
Ajaxian
Moving on from the “let me use that API” conversation and only some real stuff, urandom (thanks for the comment) let us know about the Cybernet News article on Firefox 3 performance.
They are reporting that Firefox 3 is now faster than Safari 3, and is close to WebKit nightly in certain benchmarks. I can just picture Steve coming down on people saying “we market this as the fastest browser on the planet!” which is tough, as noone stays the fastest for ever. It is a race, and I am sure that WebKit and Firefox will be switching spots a lot in recently years.
Again, this is great news for developers. I am running WebKit and Firefox 3b3 and I am really happy with both. For some tasks I choose one over another (e.g. Firebug, Greasemonkey vs. lean and mean).
I’m sure what most of you care the most about are the facts, and so I’ve compiled the results of the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test for each of the different browsers. All of the tests below were performed on the same Windows machine, and the Firefox 3 nightly builds definitely came out on top. Here are the results sorted from best to worst (each one is hyperlinked to the full stats):
Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0msIt’s important to know that every time you run the SunSpider Benchmark it conducts each test five times, and the result is the average of the five tests. So it is a rather thorough test, and definitely shows off the speed improvements that Firefox 3 is going to be bringing to the table.
Brendan has said that they are not finished with their performance work for Firefox 3, and I am sure the WebKit team isn’t sitting on their hands…. oh and what about IE 8? It will be fun when that is in the wild to be tested.