After the recent public beta release of Safari 4, it is time to do another round of JavaScript performance testing (see the last one I did). Here I compare the unstable/development releases of different web browsers, when running SunSpider benchmark (runs/minute) and V8 benchmark (raw score). The test machine is Lenovo T61 laptop armed with Intel Core2 Duo 2 GHz, 2 GB RAM running Windows XP Professional SP2. The results follow (longer is better):
Google Chrome 2.0 is the unstable version from the developer channel, where Chrome 1.0 is the stable one. Opera 10.0 Alpha unfortunately still does not include Carakan, the brand-new fast JavaScript engine from Opera. Firefox 3.1 is tested with TraceMonkey enabled, i.e. via javascript.options.jit.chrome set to true in about:config. Konqueror 4.2 is installed from the KDE Windows project (MSVC 2005 built), the latest stable version because its latest unstable still points to 4.1.96. For safety reason, Internet Explorer 8 runs inside Xenocode browser sandbox as the sandboxing overhead was found to be negligible. The laptop's power manager tool is set to give maximum performance, thus forcing the laptop to always runs at its maximum speed.
