

Chrome Mostly Outperforms Safari 5 in JavaScript Benchmarks - crad
http://gavinroy.com/how-does-safari-5s-javascript-performance-sta

======
houseabsolute
But: Safari 5 has hardware accelerated graphics on both Mac and Windows for
HTML5 video. Which I imagine is as relevant to most people, even geeks like
me, as a 10-20% speedup in Javascript.

For example, watch the video at <http://videojs.com/> in full screen on Chrome
and Safari. Last time I checked it looked way better in Safari. That said,
Chrome team moves fast and maybe they will have it fixed soon.

If you're interested in progress you can track the issue here:
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=38969>

~~~
modeless
Not only video but also hardware-accelerated CSS animations and 3D transforms.
Safari has the most advanced graphics architecture of any browser right now,
and all the major browsers are working on catching up.

Firefox's plan: [http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/01/18/layers-
cross...](http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/01/18/layers-cross-
platform-acceleration)

IE's plan: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/09/benefits-of-
gp...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/09/benefits-of-gpu-powered-
html5.aspx)

Opera hasn't publicly announced hardware-accelerated graphics yet, but they
are moving to a new codebase that could support it in theory:
<http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/vega>

Chrome actually seems like the least far along right now, which seems odd
given their focus on performance. Some of the work was done for them by Apple
in WebKit, but there's still a lot to be done.

~~~
sgift
According to this <http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/12/22/> Opera already moved
to the new codebase, but still no hardware acceleration at the moment.

------
grantheaslip
I'm getting kind of sick about hearing about how browser X outperforms browser
Y in Z JavaScript performance test. It's good to know that the browser
developers are continuing to push JS performance--it's important that it gets
better and better--but essentially every browser except maybe IE (haven't used
it in years, can't speak to it) has comparable real-world JS performance.

I choose to use Safari because it's the browser that feels the most Mac-like,
has ClickToFlash and 1Password, has great H.264 video performance, has a great
interface, continues to support the newest web standards, never crashes, and
is already familiar to me. As long as it isn't horrendously slower than other
browsers, JS performance just isn't a concern to me--it has little real effect
on my day to day browsing compared to everything I just listed.

~~~
crad
The reason why I did this was because Apple is touting Safari 5 as being "The
Worlds Fastest Browser" and specifically said "Powered by the Nitro JavaScript
engine, Safari 5 on the Mac runs JavaScript up to 30 percent faster than
Safari 4, 3 percent faster than Chrome 5.0,"

<http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html#performance>

~~~
grantheaslip
It more of a meta-comment about the genre of articles that yours loosely fit
under :).

I missed the fact that you were actually referencing a claim made by Apple--
sorry for jumping to conclusions!

------
Groxx
... though WebKit's nightly outperforms both.

Chrome updates _far_ more frequently than Safari, is it any surprise it's
ahead slightly?

~~~
code_duck
Considering they just released Safari 5 yesterday, it seems that it should be
as up to date as recent Chrome releases.

~~~
snprbob86
Apple probably locked down on a stable build of WebKit weeks ago. Google has
the luxury of staged rollouts with rollback if necessary, so they can take
more risk with WebKit builds.

~~~
code_duck
Is 'weeks' really that long? So we have to compare it to the version of Chrome
released two days ago, and not last month?

------
JarekS
I can see one problem with these benchmarks - you test dev version of Chrome
and compare it with stable/released version of Safari...

Having said that - I'm using Chrome 6 on my Mac - it _feels_ faster then
Safari 5.

~~~
crad
Edit: updated to reflect 5.0.375 with little impact to the numbers.

~~~
wzdd
I'm not sure that you should be using the "recommended tests" option of
Dromaeo, since that option includes SunSpider and V8 Bench. We already know
the results of those tests (since you ran them separately), so maybe you
should just run the Dromaeo-specific tests.

~~~
crad
Edit: Do you think it would skew things that much? It seems to show a much
wider disparity with Chrome hitting > 5k runs per second and Safari 5 hitting
only 308... My only concern about that is the appearance of cherry picking
results instead of using their recommended tests.

------
nwomack
One thing nobody ever mentions, but I always notice is how much more CPU power
Chrome takes on my macbook. It's a few years old and anything remotely CPU
intensive causes my fan to go nuts. I actually like Chrome better (I like the
interface, and it's faster) but I stay with Safari because it doesn't hog my
CPU...

------
sigzero
Do we really care that much? I think people pick browsers for more reasons
than just "speed".

------
Oompa
My experience has been Safari 5 is more stable and snappier than Chrome on OS
X. This outweighs the extra JavaScript execution speed in Chrome.

~~~
thm76
It's also much more stable on Windows for me. In Chrome a lot of websites just
crash the tab (and bring down a few other tabs as well usually - so much about
separate processes).

~~~
fierarul
>so much about separate processes

I think the process is per-domain, not per-tab.

------
melvin
Personally, I use 4 different browsers at once when I'm on my Mac. Aside from
the interfaces, I can't tell much of a difference between any of them. Sadly,
I must admit that Firefox on the Mac is a bit lacking in polish.

------
bradgessler
It also doesn't crash when I use PivotalTracker.

