Browsers
- Mozilla Firefox 3.5b4
- Apple Safari 4.0 (5530.17)
- Opera 10.00 Beta
V8 Benchmark
Fastest: Safari
Firefox: 272
Safari: 2676
Opera: 188
Sunspider Benchmark
Fastest: Safari
Firefox: 1044.6
Safari: 895.4
Opera: 4006.8
Fastest: Safari
Firefox: 297
Safari: 49
Opera: 102
Flash
Firefox: 71
Safari: 71
Opera: 71
Silverlight
Firefox: 23
Safari: 23
Opera: 23
What does this mean?
Well it’s just a small test I made without any really strict stuff, but it does prove some stuff.
First off, Cold and Warm start are totally irrelevant on Mac OS X since you basically leave the browser open even if you close all windows (that’s how OS X works). You could close it, but if you’re on Mac OS X Leopard you probably have a computer with enough RAM so that it doesn’t matter.
Secondly, as you probably noticed, Flash and Silverlight are surprisingly consistent accross the different browsers, which means they aren’t really something you can test on the Mac. Conversly, on Windows, Flash plugins considerably differ between Internet Explorer and other browsers. If you’re the one who intalled your system, you probably noticed it was neccessary to install two different Flash plugins, one for IE and one for Firefox and the others. Tests, although none I’ve done recently, have proven the ActiveX Flash plugin for IE to be much faster than the one available on other browsers. I don’t know about Silverlight, but I guess everything about IE has to be unique because of ActiveX.
Third, Apple keeps its promise on the Mac. Safari is consistenly faster in both JavaScript and Tables, which doesn’t represent the whole Internet, but it’s pretty indicative. Opera is faster at DOM operations (Tables) than Firefox, but remains slower for JavaScript.
Without a need for further testing though, until Chrome comes to Mac OS X, Safari remains the king of speed on Mac. Guessing from Apple’s tight OS/Hardware integration and the optimizations further brought in by Snow Leopard (10.6), I’m guessing even Chrome will have a hard time keeping up with Safari on Mac when it comes out.
