Better Benchmarks Mean a Faster Web

Last month the WebKit team, maintainers of the Web browser engine behind Safari and the iPhone, released a new set of JavaScript benchmarks called SunSpider. Unlike some other technical benchmarks, these provide a way to compare browser performance in more practical and meaningful ways:

It’s based on real code that does interesting things; both things that the web apps of today are doing, and more advanced code of the sorts we can expect as web apps become more advanced.

This is wonderful not just because it gives Web developers another tool to test and improve the performance (and user experience) of our applications, but it also gives browser makers strong motivation to improve the speed of their browsers.

This bodes well for everyone because we can all expect better, faster, richer, and more powerful Web applications in the future. We can already see the improvements we may get in the near future by running the benchmarks on unreleased development versions of browsers such as Firefox (beta 3 is nearly 40% faster than version 2) and Safari (WebKit nightly builds are a blazing 130% faster than Safari 3!)

The only bad news: so far Internet Explorer is lagging significantly behind in one of the benchmarks. Hopefully IE 8 will narrow the gap, or we may have more browser switchers on the horizon.