Firefox in the dust: Opera poised to reclaim browser performance lead

Even Opera's speed gains alone aren't the scariest part of this story. There's two ways to make a car go faster. One is to put your foot on the gas, and the other is to replace its engine with something more efficient. There's a cost involved with the former, as fuel efficiency goes down.

Adding resource efficiency to the browser test score system completely changes the way we analyze Web browsers. When Google Chrome gets faster in recent months, it's because it pushes the accelerator petal down. Now we can measure just how much.

Chrome uses a slick trick to get more power, effectively distributing its workload not just among multiple threads but often to two processes as well. (It apparently has the capability to fork a third, but when we've observed Chrome doing so, it doesn't yet make much use of the third process and typically shuts it down.) Using the Performance Monitor tool now built into Windows 7, Ingenus now monitors the peak and average CPU utilization and memory usage over the time span of its longer tests, including SlickSpeed, and compares those figures against the same consumption rates for the old Firefox 3.0.19.

Up until IE9, Microsoft never really produced a high-performance browser. On the other hand, IE wasn't a fuel hog, either. Like the Chevy Chevette of the 1980s, IE was relatively fuel-efficient, especially when handling small workloads. That's why it scores a 3.899 on the efficiency segment of Ingenus' test battery, and why all other browsers typically go down from there instead of up. With the original 10-iteration-per-selector SlickSpeed test, IE8's efficiency scores were typically good, at or around 1.0. When we bumped the iteration count to 100, IE8 exhausted itself with an efficiency score of 0.644.

Chrome's generally good SlickSpeed scores come at a cost. Google's latest public beta, version 7.0.517.24, posted a relative speed score of 8.189 on the SlickSpeed - a little slower than the stable build, but probably because beta code often contains debugging features that are removed for the stable version. The speed score for the latest not-so-public development build 7.0.544.0 moved up to 8.383. The resource cost for that speed boost is measurable, with memory cycle usage jumping from about 105% to 133% (on a quad-core test system, each core accounts for 100%, so total CPU utilization on Performance Monitor is 400%), and peak memory consumption jumping by almost half. So efficiency scores decline from 1.362 for the public Chrome beta, to 1.254 for the dev build.

Keep in mind that each single point of efficiency is the same as one whole Firefox 3.0. Yes, IE8 is nearly four times more efficient with computer resources than Firefox 3.0 (as Microsoft engineers will probably say, it would have been nice if someone had said that out loud two years ago; and in retrospect, I concur).

Conceivably, Opera 10.7 could have achieved its performance gains by throttling up by 50%, doubling its memory allocation, and throwing on the afterburners. It didn't. Instead, its updated engine sipped CPU cycles at 79% peak utilization and just over 8% average utilization, which in real-world numbers means the new Opera never used more than 20% of a quad-core CPU to process more CSS instructions than it will likely ever need to process in a four-minute period.

The thrills don't stop there. There was a time not long ago, still measurable in months, when the SunSpider test battery was the browser's equivalent of a Marine training obstacle course. Although Opera 10.7 did not post the best SunSpider processing scores (IE9 remains the champion here with a 14.268 compared to 11.995 for Opera 10.7 and an impressive 12.195 for the daily build of Firefox 4 Beta 8), its resource utilization barely moved the needle. Registering just over 9% on the Performance Monitor at its peak, and 4% on average, the Opera dev build actually never used more than 3% of an Intel quad-core CPU to process the entire SunSpider battery.

That's how Opera achieved an efficiency score of 9.696 on the SunSpider, compared to 6.951 for the latest WebKit snapshot running in Safari 5, 4.009 for the latest dev build of Chrome, and 3.986 for IE9. Sure, IE9 has the best speed here, but the Performance Monitor needle can tip the 40% mark (10% actual utilization).

The Opera 10.7 beta's total efficiency score of 4.016 makes it the first browser in Ingenus' tests to score above IE8's benchmark of 3.899, and the very first browser to effectively perform better than what's shipped with Windows without sacrificing efficiency or increasing overall memory use. You lose nothing by switching to Opera, which is something that you could never say for Firefox. Imagine owning a great sports car - a Mustang, Challenger, or Camaro - that you could say sipped gasoline like a Chevette.

Overall scores for Firefox 4 Beta 8 show that Mozilla's engineers are indeed continuing to move forward, scoring a 3.478 overall compared to 2.199 for the stable Firefox 3.6.10. But if Apple's gains with the latest snapshot builds of the WebKit engine are indicative of Safari 5's future, Mozilla could very well find itself later this year minting its final Firefox 4 as the lowest performing stable browser in the top five, taking IE's place on the bottom of the heap. Today, Beta 6 and Beta 8 are posting the lowest scores for any development build browser in the JSBenchmark battery (3.822 for Beta 8 versus 4.368 for Safari 5 + WebKit 69025, with the rest higher), the Ingenus DFScale variable workload battery (3.721 for Beta 8 versus 6.191 for Safari 5.0.2, with the rest higher), and the Man-in-Blue sphere animation battery (1.876 for Beta 6 versus 2.731 for Opera 10.62, with the rest higher.)

What appears to be a change in the test browser's HTML 5 Canvas plotting engine, is responsible for the one bright spot for Mozilla: a big improvement in Firefox 4 Beta 8's overall efficiency score over Beta 6, from 1.728 to 3.346. Computationally speaking, Beta 8 is now a bit faster than the latest Safari/WebKit, with a 6.579 score versus 6.488. That doesn't even compare, however, to the IE9 beta at 7.645.

Beginning now, Ingenus will provide continual updates on Windows 7 browser performance, so you can see for yourself which browser maker has the best performing model right now.

This article originally appeared in Net1News.

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