W-Shadow.com

To see how the latest versions of the most popular web browsers stack up, I ran five of them – Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5-dev, Internet Explorer 8.0, Opera 10.51 and Safari 4.0.5 – through a number of benchmarks and performance tests. The results are below (click the image to enlarge it).

Benchmarks Used

• SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark
• SlickSpeed Selector Test (WebKit version; jQuery results were used in the chart above)
• CSS Rendering Benchmark
• The HTML5 Test
• Windows Performance Monitor (to track CPU usage).

Personal Notes

As could be expected, the light-weight Chrome comes out as the winner in most benchmarks (though sometimes only by a bit) and the much-loathed IE trails the pack. It’s also nice to see that Opera (my personal favourite) has improved so greatly with the 10.51 release.

However, the relatively modest performance of Firefox 3.6 surprised me. Ordinarily one could write it off as the result of running way too many extensions, but that’s unlikely to be the case this time – all the benchmarks were run using a new, clean profile. It’s a mystery.