Google Ditches V8 JavaScript Benchmark, Goes for "Higher" Octane

Since its inception, Google's V8 Benchmarking Suite has been a staple of JavaScript benchmarking. It's one of the standard tools used in any test that focuses on browser performance. But it's been around a few years and, while it has gotten improvements constantly, Google thought a bigger update was necessary.

Hence Octane was born. The new benchmark suite integrates V8's tests but adds several more of itself. Unlike the previous tests though, which focused on a particular feature or capability, the five new tests are based on real-world JavaScript apps. In fact, most of them are real-world JavaScript apps and libraries.

"Most of the existing JavaScript benchmarks run artificial tests that were created on an ad-hoc basis to stress a specific JavaScript feature," Google's Stefano Cazzulani explained the problem.

"Octane breaks with this tradition and extends the former V8 Benchmark Suite with 5 new benchmarks created from full, unaltered, well-known web applications and libraries. A high score in the new benchmarks directly translates to better and smoother performance in similar web applications," he said.

Google chose Box2DWeb for one of the tests, the JavaScript version of the popular and well known 2D physics engine Box2D. The library is used by plenty of browser games.

Pdf.js, Mozilla's JavaScript based PDF reader is used in another test. Pdf.js is built into Firefox, but is also offered as a stand-alone product. It's a great example of a powerful web app that replaces the need for native ones. Octane uses it to load and decode a PDF document and checks how fast this is accomplished.

Google also chose a Game Boy emulator to run a 3D demo. This should be a good example of complicated and demanding apps written in JavaScript. Finally, Octane tests how fast a browser loads and uses common JavaScript libraries like the ubiquitous jQuery and Google's own Closure.

You can try out Octane for yourself right now. A nice part about is that it's been adapted to work well on any type of device, desktops, smartphones or tablets.