Comparing Chromium and Firefox 3.5/3.6/3.7 Nightlies’ JavaScript Performance

I have always been interested in efficiency and performance. So much, in fact, that when I finished installing three different trunk (latest source code) builds of Firefox (3.5.6, 3.6, and 3.7), I just had to compare their JavaScript performance with that of Chromium. I have heard that the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine got some performance boosts in 3.7, and wanted to find out for myself just how fast the engine was and if it was faster than Chromium’s V8 JavaScript engine. The defacto JavaScript benchmark seems to be the SunSpider test, so I went ahead and used that. I was about to use the V8 Benchmark Suite, but decided against it because it was more of a benchmark for the V8 developers when they are improving V8′s performance.

The following results show the time it took to complete the SunSpider tests +/- the 95% confidence interval.

Chromium (Build 33067): 1068.8ms +/- 17.8% [SunSpider Results]

Firefox 3.7a1pre Nightly: 1853.8ms +/- 15.3% [SunSpider Results]

Firefox 3.6b5pre Nightly: 5239.2ms +/- 2.8% [SunSpider Results]

Firefox 3.5.6pre Nightly: 5420.2ms +/- 15.7% [SunSpider Results]

Using SunSpider’s nifty comparision feature (and you can try it yourself with the links provided), I found that Chromium’s V8 engine was significantly faster than all of the TraceMonkey engines in all tests, except for the engine included in 3.7a1pre, where a few tests (mostly math related ones) were inconclusive.

Just for the heck of it, here’s a nice graph I made with Google Docs (click on it to see a bigger version):

It looks as if the speed gap between V8 and TraceMonkey is slowly closing. Of course, I expect nothing less from the open source community.

UPDATE: Mariano posted a comment asking about the computer specs and operating system, so here they are:

• AMD Athlon X2 5200+ (~2.7GHz)
• 6GB DDR2 800 RAM
• Asus EN9500GT TOP
• Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala