Expect 22.8% performance boost from next week's Firefox 3.6 beta

We found the TestCube geometry test, which was created to address a bug that a Mozilla developer had discovered in Firefox. After we were told there were several areas we hadn't discovered where Opera is clearly the faster browser, we found our readers to be correct on that count, at least with respect to DHTML graphics rendering. Here not only is Opera the clear leader, but Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 is right on the heels of Chrome 3.

One of the more unique test batteries we've uncovered evaluates each browser's performance with handling 10 different permutations of JavaScript libraries -- specifically, how each browser performs when selecting a CSS element mathematically. This is Safari's strong point, though even Opera outperforms Firefox in this class as well.

When a Web page doesn't use CSS to divide its elements, it uses old-style <TABLE> elements. And just because developers...deprecate their use doesn't mean they're not everywhere. In concentrating on developing for newer standards, Firefox actually performs relatively slowly in the table handling category, though the standards-compliant Chrome handles old-style tables with ease. What's amazing here, though, is the gap between performance scores in this battery for both stable/beta and dev editions of Chrome, on Windows 7 (12.60) and Vista (6.69). Chrome is also faster on this test on Win7 than on XP, which is unusual given its usual preference for XP.

Chrome's performance on the general page load test is all over the map, and this appears to be due to Google changing its strategy for how it "fires" (enacts) certain JavaScript loading events, evidently across platforms. We understand that the JavaScript onLoad event is not a good indicator of the time it takes for pages to load, so we don't pretend that it is. However, from a performance standpoint, the fact that these events can fire earlier on some browsers (especially Safari) is a true performance boost for developers -- it means that scripts can start accessing page elements and filling their contents dynamically, even as other elements of the page are still loading. This isn't cheating; it's multitasking, and Safari does it well especially in XP. But you're reading this right: The availability of page elements on the everyday page loading test was much faster on Chrome 3 in Vista (!) than on any other platform. (Now you see why we run a variety of tests and find the average or mean of their scores.)