Google Chrome in a runaway lead for browser performance supremacy

We added the TestCube 3D battery earlier this month in deference to a number of Betanews readers who pointed out that we weren't paying enough attention to the browser's capability to plot and work geometry simultaneously. This test remains Opera's forte, especially on XP where Opera 10 Beta 1's numbers are better than double those of Google Chrome. There's something here about parallelism between rendering and math that Opera still gets and the others don't.

The SlickSpeed test measures how well each browser manages a variety of different JS libraries, especially for managing layout elements in a page and arrays full of content strings. Firefox's scores for stable and beta versions are improving here, especially for XP, although it's interesting how Vista and Win7 scores are very close to one another. Safari is the king, for now, with JavaScript library management.

The Nontroppo table rendering test examines how well the browser manages the <TABLE> element -- the part of HTML that CSS proponents would just as soon everyone forget about. But many old-style Web sites prefer the old HTML way of dividing pages over the more modern CSS, maybe just because CSS is just one more thing to have to learn. The surprise here is how Chrome 4's performance in this test on Windows 7 is actually quite poor; we ran this test several times, and the amount of time Chrome 4 consumed in attempting to find the start of the table sequence, was much slower than for Chrome 3. Version 4 made up for this by rendering the table faster, but it could not make up for the time lost.

The third Nontroppo test in our suite evaluates how fast each browser renders a very ordinary page that does not use CSS -- a majority of Web pages still out there (though a declining one with Yahoo's recent closure of GeoCities). We just can't figure out the scores from Mozilla's latest preview build of Firefox 3.5.5 (the "Shiretoko" track), but there it is: a 9.90 on XP versus a 2.34 on Windows 7, even slower than Vista. Both 3.5.5 and 3.6 Beta 1 are actually slower at accessing the first element of the page in memory than even 3.5.4, but 3.6 makes up for this by rendering the page almost one-third faster.

One of the two new additions to our CRPI suite is Delgado's Canvas rendering test, which evaluates how well the browser uses its internal Canvas object to render graphics in memory, rather than rely on the server to provide graphics for it. It's a two-part test where the outlines of the 48 contiguous United States are rendered in the first, and a detailed outline of Alaska is rendered in the second. Firefox is actually quite good with this -- we expected Firefox to be bested by Opera here, and it wasn't. But Chrome still has a clear advantage.

The second addition is actually a very old library that tests how well the interpreter executes individual JavaScript instructions in a sequence of 1,000,000 iterations. There were two surprises for us here: First and most obvious is the poor performance of Opera, a clear indicator that Opera slows down exponentially as a task gets heavier and heavier. If Opera's developers can concentrate on this alone, Opera 11's performance could start to rival at least Firefox's. The second surprise was Firefox itself, whose scores were right in line with those of Safari and Chrome -- quite competitive, in fact -- except for Chrome on XP, where Google once again runs away with the show.