I just installed the newly released Firefox 3 beta 5, replacing beta 4 in my Macbook Pro's XP partition (a budding addiction to Oblivion has been making me boot into Windows more than I should). The main highlight of this released compared to the previous beta 4 is the enhanced Javascript performance.
To see how much of a boost Javascript got, I ran the SunSpider Javascript Benchmark with several current browsers. Here are the results I got on my machine, with a Core 2 Duo CPU @ 2.40 GHz and 2 GB RAM:
- Firefox 3 beta 5: 5000.6ms +/- 2.8%
- Firefox 3 beta 4: 5593.8ms +/- 1.7% - FF3b5 is 12% faster
- Safari 3.1 (525.13): 6111.4ms +/- 2.5% - FF3b5 is 22% faster
- Opera 9.50 beta: 10252.4ms +/- 18.8% - FF3b5 is 105% faster
- Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13: 29836.0ms +/- 15.0% - FF3b5 is a whopping 497% faster (I had no idea IE had fallen so far behind in the Javascript race).
To test the Javascript abilities of you browser, here's a couple of jewels from the past reimplemented in Javascript: Manic Miner and Donkey Kong. Both are surprisingly hard -- where's all my muscle memory gone?
Try the latest WebKit nightly. I got ~ 2000ms.
Posted by: Eli | 2008.06.03 at 04:15