V8 - the extremes

When it comes to the V8 Benchmarks, Chrome is still king, even on a Mac. Despite the fact that this is running under Parallels, Chrome 2 is almost twice as fast on the iMac as it is on the Dell at work.

Here is the real surprise. While every other browser ran faster on the iMac than the Dell, IE8 actually slowed down. But the slow down is almost entirely due to the final test, Splay. Google describes this test:

Data manipulation benchmark that deals with splay trees and exercises the automatic memory management subsystem (378 lines).

So it seems that the VM on the Mac can have performance issues with memory management.

If there is a problem with memory management, perhaps I should shut down all of the other applications and see if the numbers improve. Yup. Look at Splay: it went from 0.397 to 143.

So, running Parallels usually works fine, but in this case, it seems important to help the memory management along by closing down other applications. Still, it is IE8 which is far behind the other browsers in terms of JavaScript performance. Hey Microsoft, any chance you can keep up with the pack?

V8 Benchmarks

Google's V8 Benchmark Suite is easy to run. Here are the results for several new browsers on my workstation, which is a Dell Optiplex GX620 with 2.79 GHz Pentium D and 3.49 GB of RAM. Wow. I didn't expect to see Webkit being this much faster. If my brand new Firefox 3.5 is given a relative score of 1, Safari 4 on Windows has a score of 7.5, Google Chrome has a relative score of 8.6. Internet Explore 8 has a score of 0.21. Webkit browsers have an order of magnitude better performance than Microsoft's flagship browser: IE8.

So, is Microsoft that bad a writing a JavaScript interpreter or are they trying to move us away from web standards like JavaScript and toward Silverlight?

IE8: on Acid3

Just for fun, I tested Internet Explorer 8 on the Acid3 test. For completeness, the test was run on the morning of June 16, 2009. Today, Opera 10 was released. Opera 10, along with the recently released Safari 4, have attained a score of 100% on the Acid3 test. I also tested Chrome, release 2.0.172.31, and it also scored 100%. Is browser conformance breaking out? Helas, no. Just to prove what I say, I'm including bitmaps of 'About Internet Explorer at the time of the test. As you can read, I am using version 8.0.6001.18702. This is running on XP, as you can probably guess from the title bar.
During the test, I was asked if I wanted to let an ActiveX component run, I believe that it was for XML processing, but I foolishly clicked OK before recording the component name. The test looked like it completed at 12%. I was surprised to see what appears to be an HTML text area suddenly pop up.

After several seconds, the score started to creep up, finally reaching 20%. This is consistent with the scores reported at Anomalous Anomaly, which has much more complete Acid3 test results. Finally, I tested Firefox 3.0.10, which produced a score of 71%. As expected, this is also consistent with Steve Noonan's results at Anomalous Anomaly.

I also checked Acid2, all the browsers scored 100%. Perhaps there is still hope that bothIE and Firefox will be made more standard compliant so that there Acid3 scores can match their Acid2 scores.
[followup on July 20, 2009] Firefox 3.5 is making rapid progress. With Firefox 3.5.1, I have an Acid3 score of 93. My IE scores have remained the same.