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With the recent release of the Google’s Chrome browser lots of sites have jumped on it and started churning out reviews. However, most reviews focus on Chrome vs Firefox – for example, I have already seen no less than three articles discussing whether Chrome’s brand new JavaScript engine is really faster than the one used in FF equivalent.

How about some variety, then? Here are the results of five popular JavaScript benchmarks I ran in Chrome and Opera.

Browser versions : Opera 9.52 and Google Chrome 0.2.149.29

V8 Benchmark Suite

Google’s own JS benchmark that was used to tune the new JavaScript engine. Unsuprisingly Chrome fares much better than Opera in this one (a higher score is better).

Dromaeo

Mozilla JavaScript performance test suite. Like the V8 benchmark, it also uses a number of algorithmic, pure-JS tests without any DOM operations. Lower numers are better.

CelticKane Javascript speed test

There’s not a lot of detail available ont what, exactly, this benchmark tests but I included it as it seems fairly well known. Oh, and Opera wins this one 🙂 (lower numbers are better).

Webkit’s Sunspider

Another pure-JS benchmark. Again, lower is better.

SlickSpeed Selectors Test

Runs a number of DOM lookups using various popular JavaScript libraries and frameworks (e.g. jQuery), lower numbers are better. Interestingly, Chrome’s advantage isn’t that clear cut in DOM operations – Opera is faster with 2 frameworks and gets fairly close to Chrome’s performance in other tests.

Note : I had to do some hacking to get it to run in Opera because the test page contains an unsecaped &em;i&em; tag embedded inside a ‘name’ attribute (which is bad and definitely not valid XHTML).

In conclusion, Chrome is way faster than Opera in pure-JavaScript tasks, but Opera comes closes and sometimes even surpasses Google’s browser in the speed of DOM operations.