> Having recently done some benchmarking of my own code, and from simply running the browsers side-by-side a fair bit, this doesn't surprise me a bit. Firefox 4 consistently comes out 3x slower or worse than Chrome/Safari
It really depends on the benchmark. On the official ones FF4 does very well, on yours apparently it doesn't, ditto the one in the article.
There is little meaning to general statements at this point, when all the major JS engines are quite fast. It really depends on the benchmark. It would be easy, for example, to show a benchmark where FF4 is faster than Chrome, but again, it would prove nothing.
Which is why I like speed tests of real-world code. One isn't even remotely conclusive, no, but I'd argue that the results from many form a far more accurate measure than specific benchmarking code.
Benchmarks, especially the big ones, are targets for improving JS engines, while cases they don't cover may not get as much attention. The "official" ones should always be taken with a gigantic grain of salt. Especially as I believe I read that Mozilla's in-the-works engine is experimenting with making optimizing transformations of JS code to improve its speed, where none of the others do because it breaks from the spec, or some such argument.
I don't know where you heard that Mozilla is considering breaking the spec to improve JavaScript performance, but I can practically assure you that there are no plans to do that from what I've read.
Comments
> Having recently done some benchmarking of my own code, and from simply running the browsers side-by-side a fair bit, this doesn't surprise me a bit. Firefox 4 consistently comes out 3x slower or worse than Chrome/Safari
It really depends on the benchmark. On the official ones FF4 does very well, on yours apparently it doesn't, ditto the one in the article.
There is little meaning to general statements at this point, when all the major JS engines are quite fast. It really depends on the benchmark. It would be easy, for example, to show a benchmark where FF4 is faster than Chrome, but again, it would prove nothing.
Which is why I like speed tests of real-world code. One isn't even remotely conclusive, no, but I'd argue that the results from many form a far more accurate measure than specific benchmarking code.
Benchmarks, especially the big ones, are targets for improving JS engines, while cases they don't cover may not get as much attention. The "official" ones should always be taken with a gigantic grain of salt. Especially as I believe I read that Mozilla's in-the-works engine is experimenting with making optimizing transformations of JS code to improve its speed, where none of the others do because it breaks from the spec, or some such argument.
I don't know where you heard that Mozilla is considering breaking the spec to improve JavaScript performance, but I can practically assure you that there are no plans to do that from what I've read.