I spent some time during this weekend on examinating different versions of Firefox and other browsers against BenchJS.
Why BenchJS? First, it’s independent. It doesn’t use Gecko like Mozilla people would like it to be used. Second. It’s pretty generic. It tests animation, various JS functions, window open and window close, table drawing etc.
It also probably has some flaws. Like, for example some browsers may “cheat” by reporting that they finished after they finished calculations but before the result was presented on the screen and layed out.
So, on the one hand, please, remember that this is data from one benchmark test. It doesn’t say what “is faster” overall, it says what “is faster on this test”. So all “gecko is slow” people, don’t use it in your flamewars please. On the other hand, it says something. It may or may not represent the wider situation, but it’s a piece of data and we should think about it.
All results are the best ones of three tries.
Let’s get to tests.