Firefox vs. Chrome vs. IE: Benchmark battle

[nsane.forums]

There's no doubt the latest crop of stable browsers from Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are the best the companies have ever produced. But how do they perform when tested under identical conditions?

CNET put the latest stable versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer through a gauntlet of benchmarks that considered JavaScript and HTML5 performance, as well as boot times and memory usage. (Opera and Safari were not tested because they have not been updated recently, and neither has yet implemented hardware acceleration close to the level that the other three browsers have.) Note that these charts are at best a snapshot in time, and are dependent on the hardware being used and any extensions installed. The full charts are below, followed by analysis and an explanation of our methodology.

*JSGamebench was conducted by Facebook developers. The test was included because it's a publicly available test of real-world gameplay, though we opted to use Facebook's published data for simplicity's sake. The hardware acceleration using WebGL results were not included because only Firefox 4 and Chrome 11 were included in the test group, and Chrome 11 was not tested by CNET this round because it's still in beta.

<table class="geekbox"> <tr class="header"> <th></th> <th>Chrome 10</th> <th> Internet Explorer 9 </th> <th> Firefox 4</th> </tr> <tr class="odd"> <td>SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms)</td> <td>336.20</td> <td>250.60</td> <td>292.37</td> </tr> <tr class="even"> <td>Kraken (ms)</td> <td>8,806.30</td> <td>15,606.77</td> <td>7265.13</td> </tr> <tr class="odd"> <td>V8 v6 (higher is better)</td> <td>5,173.67</td> <td>2,235.33</td> <td>3540.33</td> </tr> <tr class="even"> <td>JSGamebench 0.3* (higher is better)</td> <td>322.00</td> <td>1,156.00</td> <td>1,482.00</td> </tr> <tr class="odd"> <td>Boot time (s)</td> <td>26.22</td> <td>21.86</td> <td>17.80</td> </tr> <tr class="even"> <td>Memory (kb)</td> <td>390,532</td> <td>205,616</td> <td>148,020</td> </tr> </table>

Though the competition is extremely close in some cases--especially JavaScript rendering--Firefox 4 is strongly favored by HTML5 processing, boot time, and memory usage. Overall, I'd judge from these results that Firefox 4 is the winner this time around.

Chrome, however, is absolutely killing it on Google's V8 benchmark. Expect the next version of Chrome to perform much better on the JSGamebench test, once hardware acceleration has been fully enabled. You currently have to toggle a few switches in about:flags to get it all. Also expect Chrome's boot time and memory performance to improve--Google has said it plans to spend more time working on Chrome's memory hogginess in the coming versions.

Given the renewed resurgence in Internet Explorer, it's also hard to imagine that the IE development team isn't already working on making the browser better.

Also of interest is that the SunSpider results are extremely close. The gulf between 250 milliseconds and 290 milliseconds is just not going to be that detectable by the average person.

How we tested

Our test machine was a Lenovo T400, with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 chip running at 2.53GHz, with 3GB of RAM, using Windows 7 x86. We used four publicly available tests: WebKit SunSpider 0.9.1, Mozilla Kraken 1.0, Google V8 version 6, and JSGameBench 0.3. All tests except for JSGamebench were conducted using a "cold boot" of the browser, that is, both the computer and the browser being tested were restarted before each test. Each test was performed three times, and the results you see are the averages. Browsers had all extensions and add-ons deactivated for the tests.

We opened five Web sites for all tests, in addition to any test site. These were: talkingpointsmemo.com, aol.com, youtube.com, newyorktimes.com, giantbomb.com, cnettv.cnet.com.

The boot time benchmarks were conducted by manually starting a stopwatch when clicking on the browser's taskbar icon, and then hitting stop when the last tab's resolving indicator stopped rotating. One half-second was subtracted from Internet Explorer 9's pre-averaged times to account for the extra time it took to hit the Reload previous session link, since the browser doesn't support that feature the way Firefox 4 and Chrome 10 do.

The memory test was conducted by opening the aforementioned set of tabs and looking at Google Chrome's memory manager. You can access it by typing "about:memory" into the Chrome location bar. The figure we used is the Private Memory, which only totals memory used by the browser that's not shared by other processes. It's also useful because it tallies all of Chrome's open tab memory usage into one convenient number.

View: Original Article

[DKT27]

This proves my point that Firefox 4 has the fastest JavaScript engine out there. ^_^

[oZ.]

This proves my point that Firefox 4 has the fastest JavaScript engine out there. ^_^

F*** YA AND Chrome too! lmao

once ff dev team got faster start up on FF. chrome can b**w & pay me $100k USD twice

[jokeboy]

FireFox 4 seems is the average one. Hope the optimized version (PaleMoon) can release in a short time.

Then I can migrate to this cool baby. :dance2:

[Bizarre™]

@jokeboy:

You can always use tete009's custom build ^_^

[karachidude]

this final version looks to be working better than chrome as of know, at-least according to the results,wll update to ff4 soon prollly,have been using chrome for a while know

[ben01]

FF only has one drawback for me : very very slower boot time than chrome. I hope they will optimize this point, and I will reinstall FF.

[Bizarre™]

@ben01:

Are you using AdBlock Plus? If you are, try comparing Firefox startup speed with it enabled / disabled.

[ben01]

@ben01:

Are you using AdBlock Plus? If you are, try comparing Firefox startup speed with it enabled / disabled.

Yes i'm using Adblock+. It starts faster without it but I really cannot browse without blocking ads. It's just too much. (ads allowed on nsane though)

[majithia23]

use these two FF add ons . to improve the start up times

Speedyfox

Vacuum Places sq.lite

;)

[DKT27]

@Biz: Can you post the tete009 build? I believe you yourself do some changes to improve it. :) And is it multi-core optimized?

[Marik]

This proves my point that Firefox 4 has the fastest JavaScript engine out there. ^_^

they did say in the presentation video that their javascript enging is 6 times faster...therefore making it the fastest javascript engine

[Bizarre™]

@DKT27:

Here you go: Link

[Hottwire]

I like the results :)

[T4C Fantasy]

Firefox 4 is the worse this gen :P

Safari unknown = Maxthon 3.0.22.1000

SRWare Iron 10.0.650.1 Stable: 6718

Chrome 12.0.712.0 Dev: 6690

Chrome 11.0.696.16 Beta: 6690

Chrome 10.0.648.204 Stable: 6442

Chrome 12.0.716.0 Canary: 6390

Opera 11.10.2064 Beta: 5714

Flock 3.5.3.4641 Final: 5616

Maxthon 3.0.22.1000 Beta: 4722

Internet Explorer 9 Final: 4079

Firefox 4.2 Alpha 1 Pre: 3828

Firefox 4.0 Final: 3573

Safari 5.0.4 Final: 3489

Firefox 3.6.16 Final: 2266

Avant Browser 2010 Build 131: 1957

Flock uses Chrome 7.0.517.450 Engine

Avant uses Internet Explorer 7.0 Engine

Maxthon uses Safari 5.0.4 and IE 7.0 Engines

[toyo]

I hope Opera gets back on top with 11.50 :(

[T4C Fantasy]

i personally love opera aswel

[fagoatse]

Eh, more biased benchmarks. V8 and that JGS something by mozilla should be exluded. You cannot really trust them. It's obvious that no matter what one's product will perform best in their own benchmark. I start to believe that there aren't any reliable benchmarks out there.

Those numbers don't serve any purpose though, there's basically no difference performance-wise between the browsers for your average user. We are talking about miliseconds here, after all. I can only add, that under x64 linux, chromium(+ numerous extensions and adblock+) is the fastest to start/render prev. opened tabs out of all browsers. They should consider carrying those tests out in linux environement.

[eilegz]

I hope Opera gets back on top with 11.50 :(

somehow opera 11.50 its slower than opera 11 and 11.10

mostly a not optimized gpu acceleration

Im impressed by the success of firefox 4, i thoungt that everyone just moved to chrome because its "faster", but with this benchmark this show that firefox 4 its just as fast as chrome but with a better customization and addons