Updated web browsers JavaScript benchmarks

One of the main concerns about the JavaScript benchmarks I recently published was that it mixed in-development releases with shipped products that may not be as current as the others.

So, I ran again the tests with the most recent versions I could find:

• For Opera, build 9815 released on late February.
• For Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 released last week
• For Firefox, the latest trunk nightly (to become Firefox 3 Beta 5)
• For Safari, I went to its roots with the current WebKit nightly.

The results are shown below. Numbers show milliseconds it took the browser to complete the tests. Shorter bars are better.

The updated graph shows an overall improvement with the most notable coming from Internet Explorer which have managed to reduce the time to about one third of IE7’s shameful 37,000 ms.

Opera and WebKit also get a boost from their respective most recent builds trimming 25% and 50% of their respective test times. I must mention that for some reason Opera was unable to complete the md5 encryption test sometimes.

Firefox 3 remains as the best performing browser with a significant 15% gain over the previously tested nightly and with about a 10% advantage ahead of WebKit.