WebKit Nightly Builds top Chromium in OS X JavaScript tests
Competition in the browser space breeds better performance.
Competition in the browser space breeds better performance. And with Google getting into the browser game with Chrome, all of the developers have stepped up their game. With that in mind, ArsTechnica decided to survey the current browser landscape on Mac OS X to see which offers the best JavaScript performance.
Here's the test bed: a 2.0GHz Core Duo (32-bit) MacBook with 2GB RAM and Mac OS X 10.5.8. All the latest versions of the most common Mac OS X browsers were installed, including Safari 4.0.3, WebKit nightly build 47388, FireFox 3.5.2, Firefox 3.6a1, Chromium build 23572, and for good measure they included Camino 2.0b3 and Opera 10b3.
The system was rebooted, each browser was loaded separately, and run through the SunSpider 0.9 JavaScript benchmark three times in succession. The run times were averaged, though we noted very small variations in execution time.
From the results you can see a couple things. First, Firefox 3.6 will definitely have speed gains due to TraceMonkey improvements—their test showed a 12 percent gain on Mac OS X. Second, these early builds of Chrome, and its V8 JavaScript engine, do in fact edge out Safari 4 ever so slightly.
And last, nightly builds of WebKit are faster still—19 percent faster than Safari 4, and 15 percent faster than the latest Chrome alpha.
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