The BIG browser benchmark: Chrome 17 vs Opera 11 vs Firefox 11 vs IE9 vs Safari 5

[ShyWriter]

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The BIG browser benchmark: Chrome 17 vs Opera 11 vs Firefox 11 vs IE9 vs Safari 5

By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes | March 15, 2012, 2:54am PDT

Summary: The BIG browser benchmark! Chrome 17 vs Opera 11 vs Firefox 11 vs IE9 vs Safari 5 … which browser will be triumphant?

Now that Mozilla has released Firefox 11 it’s time to update the Big Browser Benchmark, where we take the leading browsers and pit them against four of the toughest benchmark tests available to see which is the tortoise, and which is the hare.

Here are the browsers that will be run:

• Internet Explorer 9 32-bit
  
• Firefox 11
  
• Firefox 10 (left in the running for comparison with Firefox 11)
  
• Chrome 17
  
• Safari 5
  
• Opera 11
  

Note

: All browsers are the latest build.

Here are the tests that the browsers will face:

• SunSpider JavaScript 0.9.1 - A JavaScript benchmark developed by Mozilla with a focus on real-world problem solving.
  
• V8 Benchmark Suite - A pure JavaScript benchmark used by Google to to tune the V8 JavaScript engine.
  
• Peacekeeper - FutureMark’s JavaScript test which stress-tests features such as animation, navigation, forms and other commonly utilized tasks.
  
• Kraken 1.0 - Another JavaScript benchmark developed by Mozilla. This is based on SunSpider but features some enhancements.
  

All testing carried out on a Windows 7 64-bit machine running a Q9300 2.5GHz quad-core processor with 4GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 260 graphics card.

On with the testing!

SOURCE: Read the complete six page test article at http://www.zdnet.com...-safari-5/19079

Steve

[GT500]

The impression I am getting is that they ran each test once in each browser (with the exception of the one where the results surprised them), so I am calling BS. I used to live in the world of browser testing, and if you did not run the tests from your hard drive and run each test 10 times and tally the average then your results were not legitimate. Admittedly, it is difficult to save the tests to your hard drive these days, and there are tests where that is no longer an issue to begin with, so I can forgive them for not doing that.

[AdvancedSetup]

Yeah - imaginge Google wins on some tests that "they" design - and for what real purpose?

Come on do you really know or care that a script ran 10 Thousands of a second faster than another? The biggest gap is 53 milliseconds in the last examle.

If you're programming your web browser to do some computational task maybe but because browser x can open a javascript game 0.0001 seconds faster than browser y do you really care?

[Guest Seagull]

Yeah - imaginge Google wins on some tests that "they" design - and for what real purpose?

Come on do you really know or care that a script ran 10 Thousands of a second faster than another? The biggest gap is 53 milliseconds in the last examle.

If you're programming your web browser to do some computational task maybe but because browser x can open a javascript game 0.0001 seconds faster than browser y do you really care?

I 100% agree with you AdvancedSetup.

In reality no one is ever going to see that 10 milliseconds faster speed. I always have considered these browser speed tests pointless, maybe if they focused more on Security rather then trying to get that 10 millisecond speed over the competition, just maybe there would be less security holes in browsers.

I personally, do not care how many milliseconds faster browser A is compared to browser B.

I am more interested to see how each browser fairs in security testing then a speed test. Security is much more important then speed.

[GT500]

There was a time when browser benchmarks were worth something. Now they all seem to focus on the same thing, and are mostly worthless. JavaScript performance is important, but real-world JavaScript performance is not the same as in these tests. Also, they give you absolutely no idea as to how quickly a browser can render a webpage. What ever happened to the rendering tests? Now people just run a few JavaScript benchmarks and then call it a day? No, the days of serious testing are long dead...