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AlBlue’s Blog

Macs, Modularity and More

Spider on the Web - performance metrics

Mac 2008
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The first thing I noticed was that it looked much better than FireFox 2 did on my Mac, probably because it fits in with the UI as a more natural application. The icons (particularly the backwards/forwards button) are a little too stylish for my liking, but generally it feels like it's been brought out of the Aqua age and into the current Mac OS X style.


  1. WebKit r34604 10920.6ms +/- 6.3%
  2. FF 3.0 12362.8ms +/- 11.9%
  3. Safari 3.1 29850.4ms +/- 17.5%
  4. FF 2.0 53953.4ms +/- 22.9%

What does this tell us? Well, performance of FF2 was really out of line in these tests; I'm not sure exactly why, but it did seem to suffer. But the key thing to take away is they're all getting a lot faster. Perhaps it's no surprise that advances in technology and compilation will have helped a little, but it's clear that performance of web engines is starting to be taken seriously. There's a lot of interesting documentation about improvements to WebKit's JavaScript renderer using SquirrelFish, and as web-sites become richer (using frameworks like SproutCore and GWT), the performance of web browsers is going to become a marketing point like never before; even more so than standardisation tests such as Acid3 ever could. (It's worth noting that both Safari 3.1 and FF 3.0 have a pass rate of around 3/4 on the Acid3 test; having said that, whilst WebKit now passes 100%, it probably won't ship until Snow Leopard which would mean FF 3.x may still be able to beat Safari to a 100% pass rate.)

Anyway, the results of my somewhat less-than-scientific comparison indicate that FireFox is a worthy browser that (it has to be said) has a number of better plugins than the Safari browser does. It also has the advantage of being the fastest shipping application out of the two; and there's no reason not to use it on a Mac now that it doesn't look as ugly as it did before. Download it today and be counted!