Full Speed

[ September 12, 2008 ]

Dromaeo: Firefox vs. Chrome

Since the recent release of Google Chrome, there has been a lot of benchmarking going on (1, 2). Everyone wants faster Javascript performance, and Chrome delivers.

Well, that’s the impression that I got from using it for a few days anyway. But yesterday I decided to go one step further and verify that feeling of greater performance. Admittedly, this isn’t the most scientific approach, but I have some numbers for you. I used one benchmarking tool, Dromaeo, to see how Chrome stacked up against my workhorse Firefox setup. John Resig has already run a similar comparison, but I wanted a firsthand look at the numbers. Here are those numbers:

graph of the results

Chrome ran the tests in 12658ms. The build of Chrome used for this test is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.29 Safari/525.13. Firefox ran the tests in 13245ms. This was the 3.0.1 release build of Firefox, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1. The tests were run on my Core Duo 1.8GHz 4GB Windows XP SP2 system.

As you can see, Chrome was indeed faster. I’m already using it more and more for Google apps, as I’m figuring that these will probably always run faster in Chrome. Firefox still is my main browser, though, because of the extensions. Chrome won’t be replacing that stuff any time soon.

© 2014 Scott Johnson (info)
• •