14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since Google Chrome came out, JavaScript performance has been one of the key aspects of any browser. While Chrome may have kicked off the battle, Opera has been wearing the crow lately.
Firefox, unfortunately, has been trailing behind with a significant gap. But thanks to the brand new JavaScript engine built into Firefox 4, the Mozilla browser is making strides and rapidly gaining lost terrain.
"Now that JaegerMonkey is available, it’s time for an update on some familiar benchmarks," Mozilla developer Rob Sayre wrote.
"Contributors to the Mozilla JS engine are making performance improvements throughout the Firefox 4 development cycle, and the progress has been pretty rapid. I ran a bunch of modern browsers on a Lenovo Thinkpad X201s running Windows 7," he explained.
When comparing different Firefox versions, the improvements are clearly noticeable. The most recent Firefox 4 builds are almost two times as fast as Firefox 3.6.9 in the SunSpider benchmark.
That's obviously a big deal, but Firefox still trails behind browsers like Opera, Chrome and even the latest IE9 preview build.
In Google's V8 benchmarking suite, the improvements are even bigger. The latest beta builds are about four times as fast as Firefox 3.6.9.
When compared to other browsers, Firefox is faring rather well. It is already performing better than IE9 Preview 3 and it's gaining on the vanilla WebKit builds.
It still has some way to go before closing in on Opera or Chrome, but Firefox 4 is still in active development, despite the beta label.
The latest performance boost comes courtesy of JägerMonkey, a brand-new JavaScript engine developed for Firefox 4 which has been recently merged with the main development line.
However, Sayer went to great length explaining the shortcomings synthetic benchmarks and stressed the fact that people shouldn't rely on them extensively when trying to determine the fastest browser for real-world scenarios.
