For those who are concerned about JavaScript speed, I’ve done a quick tour of several browsers on several operating systems:
I’ve been runnning JetStream online browser benchmark on the following configurations:
- Chrome, Chromium, U’R (Chromium fork), Firefox, Safari on MacOS X
- Chrome, Chromium, webview-default browser, Firefox on LineageOS (which is a Google-free fork of Android)
- Chrome, Chromium, Safari on iOS on iOS
- some other tests on a Android tablet
While you might be surprised by some results, please keep in mind that:
- results can be influenced by the state of the device when they were running (background services eating some CPU or RAM for instance), so they tend to vary a bit bit from a test to an other
- results have often a significant error margin on some devices
So take those results with those considerations in mind…
And the results…
MacOS X Sierra, on MacBook Pro Core i7 2.2Ghz, 16GB RAM
Note: a higher performance index means a better performance.
Raw results:
| Performance | Error margin +/- | |
| Chrome 60.0.31.12 | 152.93 | 1.59 |
| Chromium 60.0.3112 | 155.48 | 7.06 |
| U’R (Chromium 55.1.2883.52 fork) | 176.11 | 1.88 |
| Safari 10.1.2 | 219.74 | 2 |
| Firefox 54.0.1 | 135.83 | 14.2 |
LineageOS 14.1 compiled from sources (Android 7.1 fork) as of August 15th 2017, running on LeEco S2 smartphone (x520).
Raw results:
| Chrome 59.0.3071.125 | 39.81 | 7.71 |
| Chromium 62.0.3188.0 | 41.8 | 3.76 |
| Jelly 7.1.2 ( based on system webview : Chrome 60.0.3112.78) | 37.16 | 6.08 |
| Firefox 54.0.1 | 40.3 | 1.13 |
iOS 10.3.2 on iPhone SE
Raw results:
| Performance | Error margin +/- | |
| Chrome 60.0.3112 | 127.86 | 4.33 |
| Safari 10.1.2 | 129.22 | 2.27 |
| Firefox 54.0.1 (FAILS with JetStream) | 0 | 0 |
Android 7.0 on Samsung Galaxy TabA6
Raw results:
| Performance | Error margin +/- | |
| Chrome 60.0.3112 | 16.76 | 1.36 |
| Firefox 54.0.1 | 23.36 | 0.51 |
Conclusion
It’s quite surprising to see that there are some performance differences between several flavours of Chrome or Chrome-based browsers.
In particular, the performance of the U’R browser on MacOS X is significantly better than Chrome/Chromium, while it’s… a Chromium fork. However, on this pateform, Safari remains clearly the winner, and that leads to some questions: is Apple favoriting their own browser on their plateform by some obscure means? or others browsers are they lacking some optimizations?
Safari is also winning on iOS, but is close to Chrome score. (However here I have a doubt: is Chrome on iOS really using their own Javascript engine? Any feedback welcome!).Note that on iOS, the test made both Safari and Chrome *crash* several times before it could complete.
Regarding iOS again, it’s interesting to see that performances are close to what was measured on MacOS. This is an iPhone SE with dual core ARM proc vs a MacBook Pro Core i7…
On the other hand, I was very disappointed by browser performances on Lineage OS / LeEco S2. We are 3 times slower than on iOS here, while the S2 has a Octa-core Cortex-A53 & Cortex-A72 4 x 1.4 GHz & 4 x 1.8 GHz. Would be interested to get your results on a stock S2.
Last, the poorest performance is achieved on Android/Samsung tablet, which embeds a 8-core 1.6Ghz processor.
Note that there I didn’t do this benchmark on Linux since my daugther took the Linux laptop on holidays to Firenze ^^ and my other Linux PCs are too old.
— Gaël (Follow me at @gael_duval)