The benchmark by the webkit team is pretty old (about an year), but out of boredom, I decided to put a few browsers that I use through it for the kicks. It tests only the core javascript functions, and not other components like DOM, or other APIs, so promises to be consistent. A few interesting observations, and the scores below:

Test Platform:

The tests for Windows XP SP3 Professional 32 bit and Linux (Linux Mint 6 based on Ubuntu 8.10 32 bit were run on a Core2Duo Conroe 2.33 with 2gb of DD2-800 ram. The mac tests were performed on OSX 10.5.6 on a macbook with a 2.4ghz Core2Duo processor, and 2gb of DD2-677 ram. The test being core javascript focussed, I don’t know to what extend the hardware will affect the scores. Anyway, the platforms aren’t radically different, and are virtually the same. Also, all addons were disable in Firefox, as they negatively impacted considerably.

Windows XP:

Browser                                Time                                 Link

Firefox 3.0.5                       2340.8 ms                        Detailed

Firefox 3.1b2                      1041.4 ms                         Detailed

Chrome Latest Dev           861 ms                              Detailed

IE 7                                      20193 ms                          Detailed

IE performs worst as expected, and Chrome is the fastest (considering it runs webkit). But the interesting point to note is the performance of FF 3.1b2. The next big version is based on the ”TraceMonkey” javascript engine, and it performs more than TWICE as fast as the current iteration. That is a big increase! I’m sure the next iteration of tracemonkey will be able to close the gap with Chrome considerably.

Linux:

Browser                                Time                                 Link

Firefox 3.0.5                        2672 ms                           Detailed

The same browser is slower by 350 ms on linux, when compared to Windows. I was expecting it to be faster on Linux. This one beats me.

Mac:

Browser                                Time                                 Link

Firefox 3.0.5                       2988 ms                           Detailed

Safari 3.2.1                          3164 ms                            Detailed

The performance of Firefox is even worse on Mac, and safari did bad too. Shows how important javascript optimization is, as both Chrome and Safari use the WebKit engine. Obviously the chrome team is way ahead of others currently.

The clear winner of this round : Google Chrome.