Mozilla says the JavaScript performance of Firefox has now officially surpassed both the Webkit developer build as well as Chrome.
For the first time, Mozilla’s “Are We fast Yet?” charts are showing the combined Firefox TraceMonkey and JaegerMonkey build to be faster than Chrome in Webkit’s Sunspider test. Firefox is listed with a time of 350.8 ms, Chrome with 356.5 ms and Webkit with 369.7 ms.
The browser has also gained ground in Google’s V8 benchmark, where it is now listed with a performance of 2145.8 ms, behind Chrome with 1386.2 ms, but ahead of Webkit with 2490.6 ms.
According to the chart, Mozilla has made tremendous success, especially if we remember that Firefox 3 needed more than 1000 ms just one year ago to complete the Sunspider test, according to these charts. However, claims in these tests are always a bit shaky and not appropriate to determine browser speed overall.
Additionally, the performance is highly dependent on the hardware they are run on. Our AMD Phenom X6-based Dell XPS 7100 PC completed the Sunspider test with the latest Firefox JS (4.0 b8-pre) build in 478.6 ms this morning, while Chrome 8.0.560.0 clocked in at 589.8 ms. However, if you have been reading our through benchmark tests, that wasn’t exactly news as Sunspider gives Chrome a disadvantage on Sunspider.
Compared to the previous Firefox 4.0 b8-pre builds, we found this JS version on our AMD Phenom X6 system to show stable performance in Sunspider as well as Celtic Kane, but nearly 8% improvement in Mozilla’s Kraken benchmark down to a time of 9195 ms as well as a 10% improvement to 3118 points in Google V8. The latest Chrome 8.0.560.0 scored 6447 in V8 and 15,133 ms in Kraken.
We ran the array of benchmarks also in our dual-core netbook with a 1.3 GHz AMD X2 Athlon L310 processor, which scored 1105 ms in Sunspider for the latest Firefox build, a slight improvement over the 1165 ms of the preceding version. Its Kraken and Celtic Kane performance was stable, but we have seen in this environment a clear improvement in Google’s V8 from 849 to 918 as well.
We will be updating our browser benchmarks over the weekend and a midlevel dual-core system to the lineup. Check back on Monday for a detailed view on how fast the current crop of browsers in development is.
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