Safari - the fastest browser

Today, more and more pages are created in the spirit of Web 2.0. This means that AJAX technology is commonly used. Therefore, JavaScript processing performance becomes a very important factor. In order to compare the latest browsares, CNET has carried out a set of performance tests.

SunSpider bechmark was used to test the performance of browsers. The test included: preparing data for the calculation of 3D rendering, access to data, bit operations, flow control (conditions, loops, recursion), cryptography, dates processing, various mathematical calculations, regular expressions, decompression operations on strings, and others.

The results proved to be interesting. Safari achieved the best result of 910 ms. The second was Minefield which turned out to be slightly slower (1136 ms). Other browsers achived the following results: Google Chrome (1177ms), Firefox 3 (3250ms), Opera 9.6 (4076ms), Internet Explorer 8 (5839ms) and Internet Explorer 7 (39026ms). The test computer was equipped with the Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1 GHz.

On the Mac OS X, Safari (967ms) has proved to be marginally faster than Firefox (969ms) and much faster than Opera 9.6 (3803ms), which is somewhat surprising.
Detailed results are available at CNET.