What Web Browser is Fastest for Windows in 2011?

WebKit SunSpider, Google V8 Benchmarks, Microsoft Fish Tank

The SunSpider JavaScript benchmark has been called outdated by many in the tech industry and we aren’t going to say that it wrong. SunSpider hasn’t been updated in years and we all know that web browsers have greatly changed. Google went out and created their own JavaScript benchmark called ‘V8 Monkey’ and it looks like they weren’t done there and on May 5th, 2011 the company released a modified version of SunSpider 0.9.1 that runs 50 iterations versus the single iteration that the benchmark normally runs at a time.

We ran the original WebKit SunSpider benchmark we found that Lunascape web browsers did the best, followed by Firefox 4.01, 5.0 Beta 1 and 6.0 Alpha 1. When we enabled Google’s version of SunSpider version 0.9.1 that runs 50 Iterations most of the web browsers performed better. Google Chrome 12 Beta and Chrome 11 were in the lead with these test settings, but FireFox 5.0 Beta 1 was just 15ms slower. The vast majority of the modern benchmarks were pretty close to the same level of performance in this benchmark. Could it be because the web browsers are now optimizing for this benchmark?

The next benchmark we will be running is by Google’s own JavaScript benchmark called V8. We will be running version 6, which is the most recent version.

If you recall Google Chrome 11 and Chrome 12 beta lead the group of web browsers when in the first two benchmarks that we ran – Peacekeeper and SunSpider with 50 iterations. Google Chrome also happened to perform the best on Google’s benchmark (no big shock there) and blew the other benchmarks out of the water. FireFox 5.0 Beta 1 is looking good though and is notably faster than FireFox 4.0.1. Internet Explorer 9 and even 10 Preview 1 don’t do well on this benchmark. Opera 11.10 and 11.50 Alpha were slightly slower than the three FireFox browsers we tested.

The next benchmark we will be running is from Microsoft and it’s an aquarium scene where you can add fish to the tank and it gives you a frames per second result. It should be noted that this test done without WebGL, the 3D web standard, because Microsoft doesn’t support it. To render this scene Microsoft uses Canvas 2D, which is an open source web browser technology for 3D graphics.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 was the fastest stable web browser for this test, but Firefox 5.0 Beta 1 and 6.0 Alpha 1 (nightly build 5/7/2011) both maxed out at 60 FPS, which is the highest this benchmark can go. Popular web browsers like Chrome, Opera, Safari and Lunascape all had very poor performance in this benchmark.