Massive Benchmark highlights asm.js performance of web browsers

Performance or more precisely JavaScript performance has been a thing in the browser world ever since Google launched its Chrome browser to the public.

Back then Chrome was without doubt the most optimized browser when it came to the execution of JavaScript. This was a wake-up call for Mozilla and Microsoft as they started to improve the JavaScript performance and overall snappiness of their browsers as well in order to compete with Google.

JavaScript performance is not really used anymore in these days to show the superiority of a browser over others. While it is still an important metric for developers, it is not really something that end users show much interest in anymore.

This could change again with the rise of HTML5 gaming though. Demos of Epic's Unreal 3 and 4 engine that run in web browsers benefit a lot from optimizations.

This time, Mozilla is leading the field when it comes to performance. A new benchmark for asm.js has been created to highlight how browsers perform in this area.

While it is not the first appearance of an asm.js test, as Octane has one test that does that, it is taking these tests to the next level by using large source files instead of smaller ones that are usually found in benchmarks.

Considering that both the Unreal engine and the Unity engine are large codebase-wise, its large nature ensures that the test comes closer to real-world requirements than before.

If you are interested in running the benchmark on your system head over to the Massive page on Github to do so. Just click on run and wait for the test to complete.

Here are results for browsers running on an Intel Core i7, 8 GB of RAM, Nvidia Geforce GTX 470 Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and a Intel Core I5 2500k, 8 GB of RAM, Nvidia  GeForce GTX 560 Ti Windows 10 system.

Windows 7

Test	Firefox 36 Nightly	Chromium 40	Opera 27 Dev	Internet Explorer 11
Overall	4611	1595	1611	1089
main-thread-poppler-cold	0.499s	1.712s	1.692s	1.809s
main-thread-poppler-warm	0.470s	2.051s	1.543s	1.738s
main-thread-sqlite-cold	0.122s	0.821s	0.803s	0.657s
main-thread-sqlite-warm	0.069s	0.266s	0.403s	0.640s
box2d-throughput	6.891ms	8.348ms	8.266ms	16.947ms
box2d-throughput-f32	5.577ms	12.157ms	11.959ms	37.628ms
lua-binarytrees	9.162s	15.380s	14.892s	26.903s
lua-scimark	8.775 MFLOPS	5.350 MFLOPS	5.520 MFLOPS	2.895 MFLOPS
poppler-throughput	6.557s	14.857s	14.389s	31.747s
sqlite-throughput	10.748s	59.618s	58.859s	63.024s
poppler-cold-preparation	0.817s	0.462s	0.450s	0.172s
poppler-warm-preparation	0.153s	0.445s	0.421s	0.175s
sqlite-cold-preparation	0.805s	0.988s	1.015s	3.851s
sqlite-warm-preparation	0.098s	1.007s	1.002s	4.904s
box2d-variance	2.124ms	54.117ms	53.376ms	89.343ms
poppler-variance	4.764ms	31.577ms	30.032ms	39.046ms

Windows 10

Test	Firefox 33.0.2	Chrome 38	Internet Explorer 11
overall	5990	2028
main-thread-poppler-cold	0.32s	1.280s	1.090s
main-thread-poppler-warm	0.321s	1.803s	1.054s
main-thread-sqlite-cold	0.062s	0.640s	0.590s
main-thread-sqlite-warm	0.026s	0.175s	0.562s
box2d-throughput	4.893ms	6.429ms	7.686ms
box2d-throughput-f32	4.456ms	10.382ms	16.663ms
lua-binarytrees	6.518s	10.902s	17.501ms
lua-scimark	11.900 MFLOPS	7.685 MFLOPS	3.890 MFLOPS
poppler-throughput	5.245s	11.457s	failed
sqlite-throughput	7.306s	42.386s
poppler-cold-preparation	0.607s	0.358s
poppler-warm-preparation	0.127s	0.329s
sqlite-cold-preparation	0.600s	0.845s
sqlite-warm-preparation	0.081s	0.849s
box2d-variance	1.122ms	53.163ms
poppler-variance	3.788ms	27.694ms

Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10 got stuck on the poppler-throughput test. Firefox beats the competition in most tests with the exception of poppler-cold-preparation where it came last.

Now You: Which browser performed best on your system?

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