I’ve recently been using Firefox 4 64bit prebeta, also known as Minefield. I thought it would be interesting to compare various browsers to see if this supports my feeling that Minefield is the fastest browser I’ve used. The conclusions are quite interesting. I will continue to update this table as new versions are released
| Firefox 4 x64 (pre beta7) | Firefox 3.6 | Firefox 4 beta | IE9 beta | IE9 beta x64 | IE8 | IE8 x64 | Chrome | Opera | Safari | |
| ACID 3 | 97 | 94 | 97 | 95 | 95 | 100 | 100 | 100 | ||
| Peace keeper | ||||||||||
| How To Create CSS Test | 118ms | 138ms | 98ms | 209ms | 254ms | 234ms | 235ms | n/a | 49ms | n/a |
| Sun Spider JavaScript | 433.0ms ± 10.6% | 707.0ms ± 4.6% | 441.4ms ± 8.8% | 337.6ms ± 7.6% | 1148.4ms ± 3.4% | 283.0ms ± 11.4% | 251.0ms ± 15.0% | 268.2ms ± 3.6% | ||
| JS Celtic Kan | 411 ± 7 | 200 ± 7 | 325 ± 20 | 491 ± 34 | 185 ± 2 | 76 ± 6 | 41 ± 4 | 722 ± 6 | 639 ±5 | 553 ± 9 |
| Dromaeo | ||||||||||
| Slick Speed | 262 | 251 | ||||||||
| Task Speed | 3802 | 5242 | 3588 | error | error | 16766 | 19098 | 2662 | 2133 | 2339 |
| Fishtank | 37fps (1000 fish) | 13fps (100fish) | 26fps (1000 fish) | 54fps (1000 fish) | 46fps (1000 fish) | 20fps (10 fish) | 28fps (100 fish) | 30fps (1 fish) | ||
| MS Psyche- delic | 1774rpm | 3rpm | 1779rpm | 1810rpm | 1779rpm | 8rpm | 8rpm | |||
| MS Flying Images | 60fps | 6fps | 60fps | 60fps | 60fps | 1fps | 1fps | 15fps | 2fps | |
| Mozilla Kraken | 7842.5 ms ± 0.7% | 21388.8 ms ± 0.3% | 16289.7 ms ± 0.9% | 15228.5 ms ± 0.2% | 11079.4 ms ± 1.0% | 15002.3 ms ± 0.4% | ||||
| Google V8 | ||||||||||
| Non Troppo Table test | ||||||||||
| 1500 Flash Particles | 47fps | 46fps | 45fps | 40fps | 40fps | |||||
| 100 SVG Particles | 75fps | 78fps | 125fps | 37fps | 65fps | |||||
| 100 HTML5 Particles | 46fps | 48fps | 100fps | error | 65fps |
Conclusions…
- Minefield currently crashes when running Peacekeeper. This should be fixed in the next build.
- Neither Firefox nor IE are quite able to complete the ACID3 test correctly.
- It seems that Opera has by far the best JavaScript engine, but I know from experience that its page load times are not good, and I don’t like the way it renders fonts.
- Chrome and Safari are very close in performance and are the fastest overall for JavaScript if Opera is ruled out for slow data load times.
- Chrome is fastest overall for SVG and HTML5 hardware acceleration. It is also the fastest for flash (exc. 64bit), and very close to Minefield. Once Chrome has full hardware acceleration it will be indisputably the fastest (unless Minefield improves its JS engine by release time)
- Internet Explorer 8 is a waste of time.
- IE9 is a big improvement on IE8, but still lags well behind the rest.
- IE9 x64 is slower than IE9 x86 — a case of poor optimisation?
- It’s now obvious why MS made IE 32bit the default browser in windows.
- Firefox 4 looks to be a lot faster than firefox 3.6, but still slower with most javascript than Opera (altho the Mozilla Kraken benchmark which seems most strenuous gives Firefox an advantage. How fair and independent are the various tests?)
- Hardware acceleration is clearly the future whenever it an be utilised.
- 64bit firefox 4 is substantially faster than 32bit forefox 4 in a few benchmarks, but on par or a bit behind in most. Partially this is probably due to the nature of its prebeta status, compared to 32bit firefox 4 being near final release. It also highlights that many things do not benefit from x64 yet.
- Firefox 4 looks to be the most rounded browser at this moment. Hopefully an official release of Minefield will improve upon this. Chrome is a very respectable second. Once Chrome gets full hardware acceleration it will surpass Firefox
Thanks for your benchmarks. I’m running only 64 bit browsers on my Windows 7 machine and have been pretty happy with them. IE8 is OK, but for me IE9 doesn’t work at all. I hate that you can’t install them side-by-side, makes checking them back to back impossible. BTW, I’m running Minefield 4.0b8pre, just installed today from the nightly Mozilla builds. It seems faster to me than the 64 bit 3.6.12, but its difficult to be objective. Now that flash and Java are both usable in 64 bit there’s no reason not to plunge ahead with the the browsers. Peace, Jon