Friday, February 10, 2012

Browser Benchmarks: Firefox10 Vs. Chrome16 (WIN7)

Source Technovore
Following on from my earlier tests of browsers in Vista, I now present the Windows7 results. In case you were expecting things to fall the same way, you’d be surprised. The underpinnings of windows7 are different from those of Vista, and so browsers which are written to run at their best in one, may not work so well in the other, and so it turned out.


As before the 5 main clients were tested on Feb 1 2012, using the latest versions available on that day. As with the vista test, the first three tests were run in sequence, and then the memory test was run on all the browsers simultaneously. The test hardware is different from the Vista unit, being an i3-based windows7 laptop with intel graphics. Specifications are listed on a past test.

Browser
Version
Release Date
Notes
Chrome
16.0.912.77
January 23  2012

Opera
11.61
January 24 2012

Internet Explorer
9.0.8112.16421
March 14 2011
32-bit version
Safari
5.1.2
November 29 2011

Firefox
10.0
January 31 2012

Peacekeeper Test

As noted already, the peacekeeper test has changed since the last time I performed these tests, in an attempt to make them more relevant. The final scores are here, but the raw scores are given at the end.
Peacekeeper scores (larger are better)
The strangest thing here is that compared to the vista scores, some browsers barely moved at all, despite a more modern OS, and a faster processor. Part of that may be the graphics tests that suffered from the less capable Intel integrated GPU, but other browsers seemed to rise to the challenge just fine.

In particular, Firefox and Chrome had a movement of only a few dozen points, negatively for Firefox. Yet Opera, Safari and IE made huge gains over their Vista scores. In fact, while Vista gave a spread, with Chrome in the lead, on Windows 7, it appeared to be 2 distinct groups – a lead group of Opera and Chrome, and a trailing group of IE and Firefox, with Safari making a breakout.

In the breakdown of tests, it appears that despite chrome’s heavy lead, still, in Data processing, in other areas, it’s starting to be surpassed. In addition, it’s Chrome’s the only browser to support all the video formats, and WebGL, and if Opera and Firefox get their missing codecs supported, we could see Chrome beaten.

Sunspider

As always, we check out the javascript engine with the sunspider 0.91 test.
Sunspider on Win7 (shorter is better)
The results are certainly getting closer. Firefox has increased its speed, closing in on Internet Explorer. Chrome is, again, the slowest, just being pipped by Safari.

HTML5

Using the tests from html5tests.com, all browsers picked up some points, except IE9. Surprisingly, that also includes FireFox5, which gained 10 points from its last test back in the summer despite the browser being completely untouched. I can only attribute that to the test being altered to conform to the new html5 specs.

While only Chrome managed to break the 300 point mark last time, this time all except IE9 and the older Firefox’s made it. Opera is where Chrome was, while firefox has just nudged ahead for once. Chrome is way off in the distance though as we can see here.

NOTE – these results were identical to the Vista results.

Memory

One of the more frequent criticisms of both Chrome and Firefox has been their memory usage. To test the real-world memory usage, an 8-tab assortment of pages was used, which are surprisingly system-heavy. They were:
Memory test in progress
This gave a balance of data-heavy pages, and active content pages. Browsers were run simultainiously, to ensure they all had the same content. Each browser had the first tab set up, and then every browser had the second, with all actions being the same. The figures were collected from Chrome’s memory manager, but were checked (which is one reason this took a week to get out) using figures from Process Explorer.

The breakdown is as follows.

It’s pretty much the same story as for Vista, with one exception. Chrome dropped from 3rd place to 5th. Windows7 is DEFINITELY not Chrome’s strength, like Vista. Another difference is that the laptop had less ram than the desktop used for the Vista test (4gb of DDR3 as opposed to 6gb of DDR2) which may have been a factor.

Also, while Safari had, again, the lowest usage, it also became unresponsive for 20-30 second periods during the test.

Conclusion

So, which is the best browser for Windows7 at present?

It’s basically, again, between Chrome and Opera. If you want a feature-rich client, and can stand a few foibles (background tab opening locations, and having to click an extra time to start things like flash windows) it may be for you. However, it also behaves oddly with Facebook at times, and many sites that are strict on their requirements will tell you that you need to upgrade to IE7, or firefox2 to continue.

Chrome on the other hand, is fast, but system-hungry, and doesn’t come with a whole lot of features built in. Yes, it does support more HTML5 features than any other, by a long way in some cases, and it’s integration with some Google services is nice (if you use them), as is the inbuilt translation, BUT it can be a bit unstable at times, and that’s never good.

Firefox is getting there. It’s got a fanbase, that’s for sure, but security – something Mozilla has always harped on – is starting to slip. The 6-week schedule means that bugfixes for exploits aren’t being pushed out ASAP, but being held back for the next release, which does save you from constant updates, but doesn’t help if you fall prey to one of the exploits. The memory usage has improved, but now it needs to

Safari is competent and slowly improving, but the three ahead of it are improving FASTER. Windows may be a secondary market for Apple, but it’s a major one, especially if people are going to want to have cross-platform use, as you can already get with Opera and Firefox. The freezing during the memory tests was also worrying, as no other browser had any problems, or hiccups, and that penalized Safari badly.

As for Internet Explorer, what was decent 11 months ago is starting to look a little long-in-the-tooth now, even despite its Sunspider score. While it’s certainly better than previous versions, Microsoft needs to update things more often, at least every 6 months. However, with Internet Explorer 10 already in development, albeit for Windows8, I doubt we will see much in the way of improvement for 9.

Raw Data

Browser

Chrome
Opera
Safari
IE
Firefox
Version

16.0.912.77
11.61
5.1.2
9.0.8112.16421
10.0







Position

1
2
5
4
3
Peacekeeper






Overall Score

2671
2507
1640
1457
1459
Rendering

63.15
86.04
62.10
65.10
34.54
RenderGrid01
fps
162.92
199.76
153.25
199.71
90.85
renderGrid02
fps
122.18
192.62
130.75
155.10
65.76
renderGrid03
fps
12.46
27.29
14.44
9.30
6.16
renderphysics
fps
64.10
52.19
51.39
62.35
38.66
HTML5 Capabilities
of 7
7
5
3
3
6
webglSphere
fps
57.86
NO
NO
NO
39.64
VideoPosterSupport

Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
videoCodecH264

Yes
NO
Yes
Yes
NO
videoCodecTheora

Yes
Yes
NO
NO
Yes
videoCodecWebM

Yes
Yes
NO
NO
Yes
workerContrast01
ops
2474.02
2468.05
NO
NO
4287.70
Workercontrast02
ops
2900.55
3575.27
NO
NO
5558.56
Gamingspitfire
fps
51.20
50.57
52.29
50.33
57.16
HTML5 Canvas

26.30
31.36
10.16
12.19
14.59
experimentalRipple01
fps
38.81
48.19
15.66
19.69
22.67
experimentalRipple02
fps
17.82
20.41
6.58
7.55
9.40
Data

62958.90
22844.87
20839.48
21074.02
23136.76
arrayCombined
ops
9812.5
4330.5
6701.5
3956.88
5423.0
arrayWeighted
ops
403956.5
120514.5
64804.0
110011.0
98711.0
DOM operations
ops
5744.24
11798.56
10962.56
3956.88
8164.18
domGetElements
ops
633374.0
191127.0
724588.5
161812.3
508996.5
domDynamicCreationCreateElement
ops
9882.0
14071.03
27735.0
1699.5
16227.5
domDynamicCreationInnerHTML
ops
11222.5
33866.5
22875.0
4611.5
28509.0
domJQueryAttributeFilters
ops
4043.0
17314.5
4635.0
1767.5
3005.0
domJQueryBasicFilters
ops
1347.5
1667.0
1443.0
1093.5
1039.0
domJQueryBasics
ops
3607.0
1931.5
2875.0
1078.5
2367.0
domJQueryContentFilters
ops
2188.5
1796.5
2358.0
1001.5
922.5
domJQueryHierarchy
ops
5296.5
21835.0
5565.0
4644.0
4143.0
domQueryselecto
ops
18680.5
22244.5
19713.5
19340.0
242228.5
Text Parsing

148573.38
136172.35
82306.44
99369.87
69459.04
stringChat
ops
63245.5
46926.5
23432.0
52854.12
57664.0
stringDetectBrowser
ops
293590.0
701877.0
290958.0
296735.91
297975.0
Stringfilter
ops
29738.5
20880.0
38495.0
29226.5
3039.0
stringValidateForm
ops
640704.0
1208914.0
325442.5
221729.48
406074.5
stringWeighted
ops
204624.5
56317.0
44223.28
95328.88
76247.0







SunSpider
ms
303.7
288.8
301.4
247.3
262.0







HTML5 Test






Basic
/475
374
329
302
141
332
Bonus points

13
9
9
5
9







Memory Usage






Private
Kb
475220
422812
121364
375016
223584
Shared
Kb
5036
6968
16646
12165
12165
Total
Kb
480256
429780
138010
387181
387181







Virtual Memory






Private
Kb
747156
62848
220828
654768
654768
Mapped
KB
203544
25932
57204
245876
245876

Posted by K`Tetch at 2/10/2012 11:55:00 PM
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