A new browser benchmark suite is cruising down Main Street: Google Octane, which updates the V8 benchmark by adding more tests.
Although speed is a major factor in browser choice, many people don’t want to know why their favorite browser is fast — they just care that it is. But the standards and assessments used to decide how we measure a browser’s speed may also be various, so Google has got down to additional outline the taking part in box.
This doesn’t appear to be a case of the tech giant stomping all over open standards, though. Octane v1 is a revamp of Google’s V8 benchmark and adds five tests to the eight current ones, the company said today in a blog post announcing Octane.
The V8 benchmark suite has served us well for the past three plus years, but something we noticed is that the Web is advancing much faster than imagined, Stefano Cazzulani, Google’s project manager for V8, said on the phone with CNET from Germany. V8 is Google’s custom JavaScript engine that it has bolted to the Chrome browsers’ HTML-rendering WebKit engine.
Octane is the evolution of V8, said Cazzulani. V8 will still be there, still interesting, but the new [tests] are where we are focusing for today’s users. We’d like everybody [who benchmarks browsers] to use that.
Octane’s new JavaScript tests are open-source — so anybody can access them — and look at multiple JavaScript characteristics, including math and bit operations, support for future computer language features, emulation, JavaScript parsing and compilation, floating point math, properties containing doubles, and accessor properties.
The five new assessments in Octane are pdf.js, Firefox maker Mozilla’s PDF reader in JavaScript that degrees interpreting and interpretation time; Mandreel, which runs the 3-d Bullet physics engine ported from C++; GB Emulator, which emulates the GameBoy architecture and runs a 3-D simulation; Code Loading to degree how temporarily a JavaScript engine begins working code after loading a large JavaScript program like a social widget; and the generally used 2nd physics game engine fieldsecondinternet.
As with the V8 benchmark, the higher the score, the better the result. My informal testing put Chrome 21 at an Octane version 1 score of 4,945 and a V8 version 7 score of 4,221. Firefox 14 hit 3,090 on Octane, and 2,404 on V8.
Because of the JavaScript code for typed arrays, a mechanism for accessing raw binary data, and how some browsers can’t handle it, Octane received’t work in all browsers. Cazzulani mentioned that internet Explorer 9 and Safari can have issues of pdf.js and Mandreel, both of which use typed arrays. internet Explorer must work superb, he said, as will many modern cellular browsers.
Cazzulani also noted that older mobile devices will struggle with the test, although in casual tests I noticed that to be true with more than just mobile devices. Both Firefox 15 beta for Android and Opera 12 for Android struggled to finish the test, while Chrome for Android cruised through it. There are several reasons why this could be, including that the version of the test I was running still had unfixed bugs, or that there are still problems with the test implementation itself. Since the test is new, it’s hard to say.
Cazzulani used to be truthful about the barriers of the test, too. He said that Octane itself has found out areas for growth for the V8 staff, even supposing he refused to say extra about such spaces. We’ve noticed that the opposite men are doing a really perfect task. in fact, we optimize for the V8 every day, but we’d like something to guide us sooner or later. we’ve got work to do.