Javascript performance in browsers

Ars Technica has recently posted an article about the new Opera alpha release, with some Javascript benchmark results showing it is quite faster than version 9.23. It also goes to compare with Firefox and IE7, but omits some other not so unimportant browsers. I think the main reason is because they seem to have only tested Windows browsers. Sure, Safari has been released recently on Windows, but it is still quite marginal.

Anyways, I was wondering how all this was going under Linux, and also, how (good?) WebKit would perform compared to others.

So, I tried the same Javascript speed tests on various browsers under Linux on my laptop, which happens to be a Pentium M 1.5GHz.

And the winner is...

Test Iceweasel 2.0.0.6 Epiphany 2.18.3/libxul 1.8.1.6 GdkWebKit Opera 9.23 Opera 9.50 alpha 1
Try/Catch with errors 80 81 41 18 22
Layer movement 250 214 76 53 47
Random number engine 280 190 57 72 68
Math engine 343 274 82 101 91
DOM speed 205 225 18 41 54
Array functions 97 97 72 82 44
String functions 14 12 12 46 52
Ajax declaration 178 127 16 21 17
Total 1447 1220 374 434 395

So, It seems the speed gain Opera got on Windows doesn't happen much on Linux.

An interesting result, is that Iceweasel, with a bunch of extensions installed, is slower than Epiphany, despite both using the same rendering engine and Javascript library. Running Iceweasel in safe mode makes it the same speed as Epiphany, though. So having extensions does not only clutter the UI, but actually has an impact on how fast the Javascript code in web pages is going to run.

And well, WebKit is the fastest for this testcase, though it stays behind Opera on some specific tests.

2007-09-07 21:44:19+0900

firefox, iceape, webkit, xulrunner

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2 Responses to “Javascript performance in browsers”

  1. nixternal » RE: Javascript performance in browsers Says:

    […] This post is just a quickie in response to Mike Hommey’s recent blog post titled “Javascript performance in browsers“. His post was in response to a Javascript Speed Test ran by CelticKane.com. So far, they have listed all of the browsers that I don’t use. So I decided to test my preferred browser, Konqueror, with this speed test. And without further ado, here are the results: […]

  2. MJ Ray Says:

    Who cares about Javascript performance? Doesn’t anyone who cares about power consumption have javascript disabled, either directly or through add-ons like NoScript?