Peacekeeper for the browser wars
Known for their benchmarks tools, Futuremark has released their first application to measure browser speed (on any platform). Futuremark hopes to provide the one true tool, while we've been toying with browser specific benchmarks, such as SunSpider.
The Peacekeeper benchmarking suite is now freely available as an online application. And, by use of a query parameter can be run in multiple browsers, without losing individual results. The tests done by Peacekeeper measure your browser's performance by testing its JavaScript functionality. The chosen functionality should be representative for popular sites, such as YouTube, GMail, Facebook, etc.
Running the benchmark on my own machine:
- 4425 .:. Safari 4.0.2
- 2595 .:. Chrome 3.0.197
- 1998 .:. Firefox 3.5.2
- 1414 .:. Opera 10 Build 6604
iMac with Mac OS X 10.5.8, 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (6 MB, 1.07 GHz FSB), 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
As you can see, Nitro (Safari 4) wins as expected (it's after all Apple's turf), and V8 (Chrome) still needs some work, but clearly beats the rest already. For Firefox and Opera there is still some work to be done, while Firefox 3.6 will bring some extra speed, it won't be too big to close in on Chrome and Safari. Opera is working diligently on their new engine, but won't be part of Opera 10, so we'll have to wait until we'll see some real numbers.
So what kind of scores did you get? And do benchmarks make you switch browsers?
Update: The new Safari 4.0.3 now clocks at 4507 points on my iMac. Woohoo!
Update 2: The new Opera 10 Beta 3 (6613) clocks at 1550 points. Nice!
So:
Chrome 3.0.197.11: 4004
Safari 4.0.2: 2941
Firefox 3.5.2: 2140
Opera 10.00.1691: 1673
IE8: 669
So Chrome clearly beats everyone, and in Peacemaker the Complex graphics doesn't even count a bit. And that's where Chrome excels most scoring 6965 points!
AMD X2 6000+ (3,1 GHz) on Win7
"And do benchmarks make you switch browsers?"
No.
Thanks for sharing your measurements.
This morning I also ran Peacekeeper on my aging Vaio laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium (SP-2), which contains an 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (T7100):
It seems in that Peacekeeper's benchmarks in combination with the various browsers scales better on newer machines. Safari and Chrome are very close, as well as Firefox and Opera. The only constant factor is IE8's slowness.
Looking across the benchmarks themselves, Opera and IE8 simply don't differ that much if the CPU is 1.8 GHz or 3.0 GHz. Two browsers were work definitely needs to be done.
"Looking across the benchmarks themselves, Opera and IE8 simply don't differ that much if the CPU is 1.8 GHz or 3.0 GHz. Two browsers were work definitely needs to be done."
Yes, that's what I also concluded first. My hope is in Carakan :). Although they claim to become the fastest in JS, Opera has to pull out something really big, because the difference between Chrome and them gets really big. I mean an order of magnitude. That's huge, even the FF3 -> FF3.5 change is far smaller than that. We'll see (soon, I hope)
Anyway, Opera 10 beta 3 is available from Opera's FTP right now (build 1699), I'm pretty sure, that the official release will be tomorrow (that's 13th of August). Watch out! :D
I'm an avid Opera user and the benchmarks won't change a thing. There's more than performance when it comes to selecting a browser. Besides, when doing the benchmark on my system with Opera and Chrome, it turns out Opera is actually faster in "Rendering" and "Social Networking". I regard these has very important, so it's not like Opera's in trouble. Admittedly, Opera's defeat on "Data" and "Text parsing" is quite staggering.
Opera's new JavaScript engine, Carakan, seems promising from what the company wrote about in a blog, earlier this year: "The native code generation in Carakan is not yet ready for full-scale testing, but the few individual benchmark tests that it is already compatible with runs between 5 and 50 times faster, so it is looking promising so far." [1] Carakan will unfortunately not be part of Opera 10, but it'll all be fine on the longer term, I'm sure. :)
[1] http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/carakan
"Opera is working delinquently on their new engine"
I thought they were working diligently on it. Hey, maybe it's both...
Fixed ;)