Firefox 4 the Fastest Browser? Not Yet!
Browser developers like to compare their browser to others. We have the fastest, or we are closing in, or we gained xxx percent over the last couple of months have become common ever since Google Chrome made its first appearance. Asa of Mozilla yesterday published a new article with the title “are we fast yet?” in which he came to the conclusion that the latest Firefox 4 JavaScript performance resulted in the “fastest Sunspider score on the planet”.
Sunspider is a JavaScript benchmark that is typically used to compare the performance of different web browsers in this field. Claiming that the latest Firefox 4 builds have the fastest score is one thing, but neglecting Opera and Internet Explorer in the comparison is another. Asa mentioned technical restrictions as the reason, as the performance was measured in a shell test, not browser test.
The chart shows Mozilla’s Spidermonkey JavaScript engine beating both Google v8 and Apple Nitro by a slim margin.
Lets take a look at our own unscientific results of all four browsers running the SunSpider benchmark. We have thrown the latest versions at the JavaScript benchmark, in particular: Firefox 4.0b8pre, Opera 11 Alpha, Internet Explorer 9 Beta and Google Chrome 8.0.552.5 dev.
The Google Chrome browser had the fastest JavaScript performance in the test, beating the second placed Opera 11 Alpha by roughly 30ms. Firefox 4 was 30ms behind Opera 10 Alpha, and Internet Explorer another 30ms behind Firefox. The difference between the first placed Google Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was less than 120ms.
What does it mean? All web browsers offer a fast JavaScript performance. The differences in JavaScript performance are slim, and should not play a huge role anymore for most users. It has to be noted that JavaScript performance is just one of the factors of a browser’s web performance. I’d state it is time to congratulate all browsers on their performance, and move on and never look back. Yes, browsers will gain even more speed in the future but it will not have such a huge impact anymore than in the past. All are fast and that’s it. This means that it is time to look at other parameters when making the default browser choice.
What’s your take on this? Let me know in the comments.
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Submited at Friday, October 22nd, 2010 at 1:00 pm on Technologies by arrisa
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