Back among the living
Recently, I've bitterly complained about the mediocre performance of Opera on sites making heavy use of Javascript.
As if they'd heard my complaints, Opera labs today released a pre-alpha of the forthcoming Opera 10.50, including the new Javascript engine Carakan which is finally using JIT.
Since the Unix version hasn't been released yet, I did all tests under Windows 7 in Virtualbox:
| Safari 4.0.4 531.21.10 |
Windows 7 64 bit, VirtualBox
3.0.12 |
578.8 ms +/- 13.7% |
| Opera 10.50 3172 |
Windows 7 64 bit, VirtualBox
3.0.12 |
688.8 ms +/- 6.2% |
| Opera 10.10 1893 |
Windows 7 64 bit, VirtualBox
3.0.12 |
3975.4 ms +/- 2.0% |
Not too shabby, I'd say. 😄
All of the above, as usual, on a Core 2 Duo E6600 running Mandriva 2010 x86_64 as the host system.
In this context, I thought it would be interesting to compare these values to those obtained with much faster hardware (namely, a Core i750) running Windows 7 natively.
| Safari 4.0.4 531.21.10 |
Windows 7 64 bit,
native |
676.0 ms +/- 6.7% |
| Firefox 3.5.5 |
Windows 7 64 bit,
native |
1007.8 ms +/- 5.7% |
| Opera 10.10 1893 |
Windows 7 64 bit,
native |
2957.0 ms +/- 0.4% |
| IE 8 7100 |
Windows 7 64 bit,
native |
4285.4 ms +/- 1.1% |
Surprise, surprise. The only browser which scales almost exactly with the more than twofold performance increase per core is Firefox (which took 2274.8 ms to complete the test on the E6600). Safari, in contrast, does not scale at all. Quite sobering, isn't it? It will be interesting how future versions of Firefox and Opera will behave in this respect. 😉