Ajax Girl

Ryan Breen put out a call for help on a distributed performance test that had many people hitting a Dojo charting system.

The results are now in and the data seems to show:

At 37ms, Safari is easily the fastest implementation, over 3 times faster than Firefox. Internet Explorer is by far the slowest, but this may be a generic statement for the speed of VML operations. Opera was the 2nd fastest browser, narrowly losing out to Safari and turning in a time over twice as fast as Firefox.

There may be some bias in the data given that the majority of people running WebKit Nightlies are likely doing so on sexy multicore Mac hardware.

Firefox on Mac is significantly slower than Firefox on Windows. OK, so either all Firefox Mac users are on boring old PowerPC tech, the Firefox SVG implementation on Mac is slower than Windows, or my Safari hardware bias theory is totally busted. Perhaps a combination of the three. Any way you slice it, Safari’s dominating performance can’t be rationalized away — the WebKit guys have done some seriously good work on the SVG front.

Looks like Microsoft made some improvements to the VML engine in IE7 — there is a significant improvement from IE6. In the SVG space, Firefox appears to have made some marginal improvements in 2.0. Safari SVG support is new, and the per-version sample size on Opera is too low to draw any trend conclusions.

Thanks a lot to the community for helping with the test, and thanks to Ryan for compiling the data.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/performance-test-results-show-strong-webkit-outcome