One of the big claims for Google’s Chrome browser is speed, particularly JavaScript speed. Mozilla however is now putting up its own test numbers comparing Chrome and its V8 JavaScript engine against the new Firefox Tracemonkey engine. Guess who Mozilla says is faster?
Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO and the dude that invented JavaScript itself has posted a set of benchmarks that shows Tracemonkey to be between 1.28x and 1.19x faster that Google V8 running the overall SunSpider JavaScript benchmarking test.
Digging deeper Eich notes in his post that:
We win on the bit-banging, string, and regular expression benchmarks.
We are around 4x faster at the SunSpider micro-benchmarks than V8…This graph does show V8 cleaning our clock on a couple of
recursion-heavy tests. We have a plan, to trace recursion (not just
tail recursion). We simply haven’t had enough hours in the day to get
to it, but it’s “next”.
Mozilla develloper John Resig expands on Eich’s benchmarks and argues that the tests that Google Chrome developers are using to prove its speed do not simulate real world performance issues.
“We can see Chrome decimating that other browsers on these tests,” Resig wrote. “It’s debatable as to how representative these tests are of real browser performance, considering the hyper-specific focus on minute features within JavaScript.”
Though pundits may have been quick to proclaim Mozilla the loser, thanks to Google Chrome and its V8 engine, Eich retorted that Mozilla is far from dead.
What spectators have to realize is that this contest is not a playoff
where each contending VM is eliminated at any given hype-event point…Anyway, we’re very much in the game and moving fast — “reports of our death are greatly exaggerated.”
Game on!
