In an earlier post I mentioned that Opera performs very well with my JavaScript port of the software synth Sonant.
Out of curiosity, I did some benchmarking of other browsers as well (this time on a quad core Xeon running Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit). Again, I tested the tune from the Muon Baryon demo (you can get the song file here if you wish to try it yourself in the online player/converter).
For reference, I ran the original demo (assembler optimized) in Wine (I believe it should perform as in native Windows, but it uses 32-bit machine code instead of the 64-bit machine code in the browser JIT:s).
Results
So, here are the results (lower is better):
| Opera 11.11 | 35 s |
|---|---|
| Chromium 13.0.774.0 | 44 s |
| Firefox 4.0.1 | 70 s |
| Original demo (native x86, running in Wine) | 42 s |
Conclusions
Well, Opera is ahead of the competition here (it’s twice as fast as Firefox 4!), but Chromium isn’t far behind.
Also worth noting is that Opera is even faster than the native original synth. While this may sound amazing (yes, I think it is!), please remember that the comparison is not really fair. For instance, the original was optimized for size, not for speed (the JIT compilers in the browsers probably optimize more for speed), and as I mentioned, the original runs in 32-bit mode, while the browsers run in 64-bit mode.