Saturday, 22 December 2007

If you can't join 'em, beat 'em

Webkit.org, the open-source rendering engine behind Apple's Safari browser and KDE's Konquerer Browser release a javascript benchmark the other day. It's called SunSpider and you can try it out yourself here. Naturally, I could not resist to try it on the few browsers I have lying around here. And to my surprise the fastest one was the webkit version running under Parallels.
Here are the details:



So IE7 is horribly slow, mainly due to their text handling. Firefox is faster than IE, but consistently slower than Safari. But it really surprised me to se that IE was so much slower (27x) than webkit. Granted, it is a webkit benchmark so they should do very good in there. I only hope that they cover all javascript areas and did not leave out any where they perform poorly. Not because that it skews these results, but mainly because when left out of this benchmark, the webkit javascript team won't notice that they need to improve this area.

But all in all Webkit looks like it has IE beat.

Zaaf
on

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous22 December 2007 at 16:07

    The timings under Parallels are highly suspect. I would wager that if you performed them under "native" Windows they would appear more in line with what you see on OS X. Also, if you take a look at the breakdown of the results you will notice that there are several tests on which WebKit is slow relative to other browsers, which shows room for further improvement. This is more noticeable on the results for Safari 3.0.4 as much work has been done in optimising JavaScript behaviour since its release.

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  2. Zaaf23 December 2007 at 11:59

    I agree that the Parallels timings look weird. Unfortunately, I don't have a Boot Camp partition on the same machine.

    And of course, it's not meant as a serious test. I just did it to get some insights in how browsers performed relatively to each othe.

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