Firefox 4 and IE 9 – testing Javascript speed

With Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 out, I decided to do a small test of javascript speed. The tool used was SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark . The winner was Chrome run in Ubuntu, closely followed by IE 9 and Firefox 4 in Windows. The results came very close, however, so I think it’s fair to say that all three browsers performed more or less the same. As you can see n the following graph, the older versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer offered by far a much slower experience when running javascript. What was quite surprising was the performance of Chrome in Windows, which was rather poor.

Firefox 4 in Windows XP
results 458 ms

Chrome 11.0.696.16 beta in Ubuntu 9.10
results 378 ms

Firefox 3.6 in Ubuntu 9.10
results 1422 ms

IE 8 in Windows 7
results 7460 ms

Firefox 3.6 in Windows 7
results 1813 ms

IE 9 in Windows 7
results 431 ms

Firefox 4 in Windows 7
results 471 ms

Chrome in Windows 7
results 2488 ms

Chrome in Windows XP
results 1690 ms