Clash of the browsers

In the light of the recent Firefox 4 release, I decided to get all my browsers updated to the most recent version and give it a whirl with some Construct created HTML5 goodness. I used the sun example again, which serves as a relatively hefty benchmark I guess. There are objects being constantly created, destroyed, resized and the additive effect is being used after all.

Let's take a look at the FPS ranking of the different browsers:

1. Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421        54 FPS
2. Google Chrome 10.0.648.204             38 FPS
3. Firefox 4.0                                        24 FPS
4. Opera 11.01                                      22 FPS
5. Firefox 3.6.16                                   14 FPS
6. Safari 5.04                                        Freeze!

To my surprise IE 9 pretty much wiped the floor with the competition I have to say! It even has a big margin over the often praised Chrome browser, which still easily secures a good second place. 

I'm pretty much a Firefox-man when it comes to websurfing and can't really be bothered to part with the comfort of some of its plugins. But to be honest I was hoping for more improvement here in the HTML5-department. Sure, it's considerably faster than the old ffox 3.6.16, but just barely beats the also weak performance of Opera.

Also I installed solely for the purpose of this little test Apple's Safari browser for the first time and was immediately hugely disappointed. The HTML5 canvas basically froze after some seconds, only updating the canvas when you clicked the site in the browser. Weird behavior, there seems to be something awfully wrong here.

So I almost hate to say it, but kudos to Microsoft for having such a blazing fast HTML5 performance, probably due to a superior Javascript engine. I hope it won't take the competition too long to catch up though