Browser benchmarks

Browser benchmarks have been around for a good many years; you might remember Sun Spider – released in 2007 and very much outdated now – which is still available. It’s been superseded by Mozilla Kraken in terms of providing a similar suite of tests, while Jet Stream, developed by Apple, is a dedicated Java Script benchmark tool, with version 2.0 housing a Web Assembly benchmark; it’s in part based on the previous benchmark, Octane 2.0.

Both of these measure how quickly the Java Script engine can manage a suite of basic tasks. By using a wide range of different types of loads, it protects the benchmark against engine optimisations. If you look into the tests, you generally find they’re math-heavy, compiling libraries, testing crypto libraries, ray tracing, and compression tests.

As you’d expect, the newer the browser, the faster the results, but due to the more recent Web Assembly elements of Jet Stream 2, this benchmark failed to complete on “older” browsers, but that even includes the Edge HTML browser that stalled on the final test. We added Internet Explorer 11, as it’s still supported, and the Blink-based keyboard oriented Qute.