SunSpider 0.9

If there is one thing geeks like to do it is benchmark things. From how fast their code runs, to how quickly their Mac renders video, the geek has an insatiable need for metrics. The geeks behind the WebKit project (that's the open source HTML rendering engine that powers Safari) wanted to measure how fast Safari's JavaScript Engine really was. They looked at the existing JavaScript benchmarks and decided none of them did what they needed, so they built SunSpider. At the moment SunSpider is at 0.9 but it has been released so people can fiddle with it and give feedback. Test it out with your favorite browser and see how it stacks up.

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Source: http://webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html

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If there is one thing geeks like to do it is benchmark things. From how fast their code runs, to how quickly their Mac renders video, the...

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Michael

I have to add to this my scores using windows... which... just blew me away about how "fast" IE6 is ;)

WindowsXP / IE6
49701.6ms

WindowsXP / Safari 3.0.4
10532.4ms

My Mac scores were on-par with the others listed here.

December 21 2007 at 1:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jerid Hill

I absolutely love Safari. It is simple and I like simplicity.

One thing that I have noticed, though, is Safari has it's quirks. Sometimes, it is very sluggish and behaves weirdly. I have tried many browsers and I always revert back to Safari.

Recently, it seemed as Safari was really starting to slow me down. So my home computer now has Flock and my work computer has Camino. I really like both of these programs a lot. They are fast.

That being said, with the newest Leopard update, my Safari is running faster that it has in a long time, and I am extremely pleased with it again. So I find myself switching between Safari and Camino and Flock.

December 20 2007 at 10:46 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Anders Borum

These performance measurements would be more telling if the benchmark functions had not been choosen by the same developers whose performance is being measured.

They are probably not consciously skewing the benchmark by choosing things where webkit is superior.

But they have some idea of what is important and that that has influenced both their work on webkit and their choice of benchmark functions.

December 20 2007 at 6:02 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Anders Borum's comment

olliej

If you look at the results Safari 3 isn't the fastest browser (JS-wise anyway) according to SunSpider -- that's taken by Opera, and in some of the tests the performance is way worse than opera and firefox

December 21 2007 at 12:19 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

phytonix

Firefox 3b2
9694.6ms +/- 0.6%

Did not beat Safari 3.0.4.

December 19 2007 at 9:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Eric

Firefox 3b3 beat Safari 3 on my Leopard MBP by a small margin.

December 19 2007 at 9:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Eric

Firefox 3b3 beat Safari 3 on my Leopard MBP by a small margin.

December 19 2007 at 9:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Eric's comment

Eric

I'm not sure how the double comment thing came up.

WebKit nightly spanked both Safari 3 and Firefox 3 ending up with a score approximately %60 less than either!

December 19 2007 at 9:57 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

phytonix

webkit, less than 5 days old:
4530.4ms +/- 0.3%

Opera 9.50b latest build:
7685.6ms +/- 4.1%

Opera 9.25:
Did not finish every single test. But 9.50b is significantly faster than 9.25.

Firefox 2.0.0.9:
13001.0ms +/- 1.8%

Camino 1.5.4:
12148.0ms +/- 0.2%

Safari 3.0.4
9624.2ms +/- 1.3%

Conclusion:
I always considered Firefox to be the worst browser ever. And this test is also in agreement with my opinion. I used to use Opera most of the time, and now I find myself using Safari or Webkit more and more.

We can see, on my iMac Core 2 Duo 2.16Ghz, the latest Webkit is a great improvement over Safari 3.0.4. And Opera 9.50b is currently faster than Safari 3.0.4 but surpassed by latest Webkit. This is very interesting. Gecko still sucks big time.