After reading the WebKit SquirrelFish Extreme announcement, I figured it’s time to revisit the JavaScript engine / web browser race once again.

In short: SquirrelFish Extreme is fastest by a whopping 35% over its nearest competitor, making WebKit the fastest browser once again. Let’s see how the numbers come out.

SunSpider Benchmark Comparison of JavaScript Engines

SunSpider running from the command line (to ensure the test is as pure as possible) was used for this test. My test system is a 2.4GHz iMac. *

These graphs are shown in runs per minute for clarity. Longer bars are better.

The raw timings are:

Detailed timings are linked above.

Of course, browsers are not purely executing JavaScript – DOM and rendering speeds are performance considerations as well. For this, we turn to Mozilla’s Dromaeo benchmark.

Dromaeo on Windows

As you can see, Firefox and WebKit smoke Google Chrome on this benchmark. WebKit comes out slightly ahead, so we need another benchmark to clear things up. Once again, Dromaeo, but on OS X now.

The full timings for these benchmarks are here:

Dromaeo on Mac OS X

Full timings for these benchmarks are here: