Just ran Mozilla’s new Kraken Benchmark tool on my installed browsers in Windows 7 on my HP 8540w. This benchmark apparently aims to test the speeds of real-world usage, instead of pure tech benchmarking.
More than Sunspider, V8, and Dromaeo, Kraken focuses on realistic workloads and forward-looking applications. We believe that the benchmarks used in Kraken are better in terms of reflecting realistic workloads for pushing the edge of browser performance forward.
Below are the results in order of fastest to slowest. Take note Chrome is the only dev browser version I’m using, all the others are latest stable releases.
| Browser | Version | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome | 7.0.517.0 | 17593.2ms |
| Opera | 10.62 | 17846.4ms |
| Firefox | 3.6.9 | 20943.5ms |
| Safari | 5.0.2 | 22948.6ms |
| Internet Explorer | 8.0.7600.16385 | N.A. [1. IE kept asking me to stop the script as it was IE was slow and unresponsive – hilarious.] |
So Chrome is the winner, which honestly doesn’t surprise me at all given the amount of time Google seem to be spending working on speed improvements, but from the sounds of things there’s a good chance that might change when Firefox 4 hits the shelves [2. Of course I mean shelves in a metaphorical way.].
According to the Rob Sayre:
Our testing indicates that Firefox 4 is currently more than 2.5X faster than Firefox 3.6 on Kraken 1.0. Try it out, and let us know how it works for you.
Over twice the speed sounds pretty good to me so the final roll out of Firefox 4 should bring a noticeable drop in page load times.
On a Variety of Topics 
We did our own test in our real-world html5/javascript editor that confirms Chrome is still MUCH faster than other applications.
Most browser benchmarks are isolated, artificial tests that can be gamed by browser vendors optimizing those specific cases. With only those benchmarks to go on, the folks at LucidChart were skeptical that the IE9 beta would actually outperform other modern browsers in real-world applications.
To separate hype from reality, they built their first browser benchmarking tool based in LucidChart itself. This benchmark is to SunSpider what a Left4Dead 2 benchmark is to 3Dmark Vantage. Product specs don't matter, only real-world performance on a real-world application.
See the test and findings here: http://www.lucidchart.com/blog
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