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- Feb 11, 2006
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Google has made significant progress in accelerating its web browser through the GPU. The latest versions of Chrome (Chromium) are now fully hardware accelerated and are close in performance to Firefox 4 and IE9.
It has not taken long for Google to catch up with Mozilla and Microsoft in supporting hardware acceleration in its Chrome web browser, according to Microsofts tests. We took all current developer beta/versions of popular browsers out for a spin to see where they stand in terms of performance. The result may surprise: There is no clear-cut winner anymore. Just like Microsoft is now providing much better JavaScript performance than it did with IE8, Google has now capable hardware acceleration that virtually eliminated IE9s and Firefox 4s advantage in this discipline.
How we test web browsers
There is no standard way how to test the performance of web browsers and different people may prefer different methods. Additionally, results may not be representative across all platforms and they may differ considerably depending on the hardware and operating system you use.
We re-evaluated our test platform and decided to decrease the performance capability of our old hardware platform. We are standardizing all our tests on this new platform for the foreseeable future. Instead of a desktop PC, we are following the trend toward mobile and are using a compact Acer Ferrari 200 netbook with an Athlon X2 L310 1.2 GHz processor and 3 GB of memory. The system has an AMD/ATI HD3200 graphics chip with shared memory and runs Windows 7 (64-bit).
The scores on this system are substantially below what our old desktop system posted. Our little Ferrari should represent the very minimum performance you can expect from these browsers on a reasonable computer today.
Our benchmarks of choice are Mozillas comprehensive new Kraken JavaScript benchmark, the Sunspider benchmark as well as Microsofts Psychedelic Wheel benchmark, which we run in full resolution at 1366×768 pixels.
Chromes Big Jump
There are still some issues getting IE9 Beta to run on our Vista SP2 system and, in fact, the browser refuses to install until today, despite the fact that there are Microsofts well-hidden requirements for IE9 Beta. The purpose of this article was simply to find out whether Firefox is really as fast as Mozilla claims in its Kraken benchmark about 7.23x faster than IE9. But, it turns out, the news was something entirely different.
Psychedelic Wheel Test
IE9 Beta was by far the fastest browser in this popular GPU acceleration test. It showed 1287 revolutions, which was ahead of the 980 revolutions of Firefox 4.0 b7-pre. Chromium, which we call Chrome for simplicity reasons in this article, came in at 4 revolutions for the version 7.0.529.0. The GPU switches Google has mentioned so far in its blog posts did not change this number, but we also tried our complete set of switches, which accelerated the browser to 910 revolutions. Version 524.0, in comparison, runs this test at just 237 revolutions on our system. Google has made considerable progress and is now very competitive with its rivals. To achieve the GPU result, you will need to launch Chrome with these extensions: chrome.exe -enable-accelerated-compositing -enable-gpu-rendering -enable-accelerated-2d-canvas. Please note that only the nightly builds and canary builds of Chrome support these extensions.
Google said last week that it would take a month or two until the user will see some acceleration benefits and it seems that Google is on track to implement those improvements in a final version that should be out as final before the end of the month or early October. What is somewhat interesting is that Google is likely to provide full hardware acceleration in a final version of its browser before Microsoft will provide it in the final version of IE9 and Mozilla in the final version of Firefox 4, thanks to the 6-week release cycles of Chrome.
Opera 10.7 Beta does not offer any hardware acceleration at this point and scored 3 revolutions.
Kraken
Mozilla says that this JavaScript test is much more comprehensive than the Sunspider test and takes real world applications into account. There are those who claim that this test heavily favors Firefox, but Mozilla denies this allegation and recently stated that Firefox 4 JS (the version with the new JavaScript Engine Jaegermonkey) is 7.23x faster in this benchmark than IE9 Beta. In our test run, Firefox 4 b7-pre came in at a time of 33,768.6 ms, while IE9 took 217,130.9 ms, which made Firefox 4 more than six times faster than IE9 Beta and made Firefox 4 the fastest browser in this test. Opera 10.7 Beta with 43,889.2 ms, followed by Chrome 7 with 48,122.3 ms.
Sunspider
We have to get used to the new scores of our little Ferrari notebook, as they are much slower in Sunspider than they were on our quad-core desktop PC. However, those slower scores are, subjectively, not noticeable, even if they are up to four times slower on the netbook. The advances that have been made in this field, particularly in this benchmark are simply stunning and further improvements may be more cosmetics and not represent real world value.
Sunspider says that Firefox 4 b7-pre is the slowest browser in this shootout with a time of 1268.3 ms. IE9 Beta is slightly ahead with 1191.0 ms. Opera 10.7 Beta clearly beats these two browser with a time of 858.6 ms. Chrome 7.0.529.0 wins this test with 830.2 ms. Opera and Chrome are within the margin of error. Despite the relatively wide range between Firefox and Chrome, it is difficult to identify any differences in performance between the slowest and the fastest browser of the Sunspider pack.
Which is the fastest browser?
If you want to be picky, you would choose Chrome 7 as the fastest browser right now, given the fact that there are few web pages that require hardware acceleration today. If you want to use the fastest GPU browser out there, you would pick IE9. However, the reality is that JavaScript speed is at a very high level in all browsers. If speed matters to you, then I would rather recommend looking at the startup time of the browser. In most cases I suspect it will be the platform support and general appeal of the browser as well very specific features that will decide which browser you will pick. If you are looking for the best Windows 7 integration, IE9 is the best choice. IEW9 does not support Windows XP and about 60% of all computers in the world today and I would even go as far and say that you should not use it unless you run Windows 7. If you need the best search engine integration, your choice will be Chrome. If you prefer the best tabbed browsing experience, you will pick Firefox. Both Chrome and Firefox also offer the best cloud (data sync) feature integration. If you are an Apple fan, it will be Safari. And if you dont like any of the above, there is always Opera.
In any case, all those browsers are excellent choices today.
Info Credit: conceivablytech.com
It has not taken long for Google to catch up with Mozilla and Microsoft in supporting hardware acceleration in its Chrome web browser, according to Microsofts tests. We took all current developer beta/versions of popular browsers out for a spin to see where they stand in terms of performance. The result may surprise: There is no clear-cut winner anymore. Just like Microsoft is now providing much better JavaScript performance than it did with IE8, Google has now capable hardware acceleration that virtually eliminated IE9s and Firefox 4s advantage in this discipline.
How we test web browsers
There is no standard way how to test the performance of web browsers and different people may prefer different methods. Additionally, results may not be representative across all platforms and they may differ considerably depending on the hardware and operating system you use.
We re-evaluated our test platform and decided to decrease the performance capability of our old hardware platform. We are standardizing all our tests on this new platform for the foreseeable future. Instead of a desktop PC, we are following the trend toward mobile and are using a compact Acer Ferrari 200 netbook with an Athlon X2 L310 1.2 GHz processor and 3 GB of memory. The system has an AMD/ATI HD3200 graphics chip with shared memory and runs Windows 7 (64-bit).
The scores on this system are substantially below what our old desktop system posted. Our little Ferrari should represent the very minimum performance you can expect from these browsers on a reasonable computer today.
Our benchmarks of choice are Mozillas comprehensive new Kraken JavaScript benchmark, the Sunspider benchmark as well as Microsofts Psychedelic Wheel benchmark, which we run in full resolution at 1366×768 pixels.
Chromes Big Jump
There are still some issues getting IE9 Beta to run on our Vista SP2 system and, in fact, the browser refuses to install until today, despite the fact that there are Microsofts well-hidden requirements for IE9 Beta. The purpose of this article was simply to find out whether Firefox is really as fast as Mozilla claims in its Kraken benchmark about 7.23x faster than IE9. But, it turns out, the news was something entirely different.
Psychedelic Wheel Test
IE9 Beta was by far the fastest browser in this popular GPU acceleration test. It showed 1287 revolutions, which was ahead of the 980 revolutions of Firefox 4.0 b7-pre. Chromium, which we call Chrome for simplicity reasons in this article, came in at 4 revolutions for the version 7.0.529.0. The GPU switches Google has mentioned so far in its blog posts did not change this number, but we also tried our complete set of switches, which accelerated the browser to 910 revolutions. Version 524.0, in comparison, runs this test at just 237 revolutions on our system. Google has made considerable progress and is now very competitive with its rivals. To achieve the GPU result, you will need to launch Chrome with these extensions: chrome.exe -enable-accelerated-compositing -enable-gpu-rendering -enable-accelerated-2d-canvas. Please note that only the nightly builds and canary builds of Chrome support these extensions.
Google said last week that it would take a month or two until the user will see some acceleration benefits and it seems that Google is on track to implement those improvements in a final version that should be out as final before the end of the month or early October. What is somewhat interesting is that Google is likely to provide full hardware acceleration in a final version of its browser before Microsoft will provide it in the final version of IE9 and Mozilla in the final version of Firefox 4, thanks to the 6-week release cycles of Chrome.
Opera 10.7 Beta does not offer any hardware acceleration at this point and scored 3 revolutions.
Kraken
Mozilla says that this JavaScript test is much more comprehensive than the Sunspider test and takes real world applications into account. There are those who claim that this test heavily favors Firefox, but Mozilla denies this allegation and recently stated that Firefox 4 JS (the version with the new JavaScript Engine Jaegermonkey) is 7.23x faster in this benchmark than IE9 Beta. In our test run, Firefox 4 b7-pre came in at a time of 33,768.6 ms, while IE9 took 217,130.9 ms, which made Firefox 4 more than six times faster than IE9 Beta and made Firefox 4 the fastest browser in this test. Opera 10.7 Beta with 43,889.2 ms, followed by Chrome 7 with 48,122.3 ms.
Sunspider
We have to get used to the new scores of our little Ferrari notebook, as they are much slower in Sunspider than they were on our quad-core desktop PC. However, those slower scores are, subjectively, not noticeable, even if they are up to four times slower on the netbook. The advances that have been made in this field, particularly in this benchmark are simply stunning and further improvements may be more cosmetics and not represent real world value.
Sunspider says that Firefox 4 b7-pre is the slowest browser in this shootout with a time of 1268.3 ms. IE9 Beta is slightly ahead with 1191.0 ms. Opera 10.7 Beta clearly beats these two browser with a time of 858.6 ms. Chrome 7.0.529.0 wins this test with 830.2 ms. Opera and Chrome are within the margin of error. Despite the relatively wide range between Firefox and Chrome, it is difficult to identify any differences in performance between the slowest and the fastest browser of the Sunspider pack.
Which is the fastest browser?
If you want to be picky, you would choose Chrome 7 as the fastest browser right now, given the fact that there are few web pages that require hardware acceleration today. If you want to use the fastest GPU browser out there, you would pick IE9. However, the reality is that JavaScript speed is at a very high level in all browsers. If speed matters to you, then I would rather recommend looking at the startup time of the browser. In most cases I suspect it will be the platform support and general appeal of the browser as well very specific features that will decide which browser you will pick. If you are looking for the best Windows 7 integration, IE9 is the best choice. IEW9 does not support Windows XP and about 60% of all computers in the world today and I would even go as far and say that you should not use it unless you run Windows 7. If you need the best search engine integration, your choice will be Chrome. If you prefer the best tabbed browsing experience, you will pick Firefox. Both Chrome and Firefox also offer the best cloud (data sync) feature integration. If you are an Apple fan, it will be Safari. And if you dont like any of the above, there is always Opera.
In any case, all those browsers are excellent choices today.
Info Credit: conceivablytech.com