Here’s the list of tests that each of the browser took (spoiler alert – some failed these tests):
- Acid 3 Test
- This one needs little introduction. Our good-old Acid test is a standard tool for testing a browser’s standards-compliance and any browser test is incomplete without it.
- Dromaeo Test
- Once warmed up, we let the browsers battle it out using the Dromaeo tests. This set of tests gives us a detailed break-up of nearly all aspects of JavaScript interpreting, rendering, and CSS rendering performance. The great thing about Dromaeo is that, despite being a Mozilla project, it includes all the tests of the Apple WebKit (SunSpider) and Chrome’s (V8) JavaScript tests, besides the Dromaeo tests (Mozilla’s own test suite) itself.
Furthermore, it has the CSS Selector test that uses some JavaScript libraries for DOM (Document Object Model) queries and gives us a CSS performance chart. We performed all tests to ensure that the results have as little bias as possible. This is a pretty extensive test, with a very detailed result sheet. While we won’t delve into its depths in this discussion, we shall put the links of the detailed comparison data to whet the appetite of the uber-geeks among us.
A note on Internet Explorer 8 here: we could not include Internet Explorer 8 into this test as the browser behaved very erratically. We could not save its test sessions, it failed to complete the entire test on many runs; reporting script alerts often. IE8 did not play nice with Dromaeo and was thus kept out of this round. Considering that these tests used commonly used functions, this ia quite a failure on the browsers part. - PeaceKeeper Test
- Peacekeeper is a web browser benchmarking service from FutureMark. It takes into account the PC hardware configuration. PeaceKeeper simulates a realistic web surfing workload: JavaScript usage and implementation of the most visited categories of websites such as social networking sites, online video sharing sites, and so on. It also performs an intensive and complex graphics rendering test with the use of the new HTML5 (canvas) implementation for the major browsers.
- JSNES Speed Test
- Lastly, we ran our good-ol’ Contra in a JavaScript NES emulator to give our champs a real workout and recorded their frame-rate. Ben Firshman has come up with this cool new emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment System inspired by Matt Westcott’s JSSpeccy which runs on the dual-power of JavaScript and HTML5’s Canvas element. While describing a browser’s performance on his page, Ben mentioned the performance of Google Chrome to be best, with Safari close behind. Firefox’s somewhat playable framerate was also noted; but he completely skipped any comment on Opera. We didn’t forget though. Every one of the browsers were stress tested using this tool.
We ran all the tests on the same test machine, under the same test conditions.
Now let’s take at our champs, while they are warming up for the big battle:
| Web browser | Alias | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Internet Explorer | IE | 8.0.7600.16385 |
| Apple Safari 4 | Safari | 4.0.4 (531.21.10) |
| Opera 10.50 | Opera | 10.50 Build 3296 |
| Google Chrome Stable | Chrome | 4.0.249.89 |
| Google Chrome Developer* | Chrome [Dev] | 5.0.342.1 |
| Mozilla Firefox | Firefox | 3.6 |
| Mozilla Firefox Nightly* | Minefield | 3.7a3pre |
