A Mozilla engineer has uncovered something embarrassing for Microsoft – Internet Explorer might be cheating in the SunSpider Benchmark. The SunSpider, although developed by Apple, has nowadays become a very popular choice of benchmark for the JavaScript engines of browsers.
While Mozilla engineer Rob Sayre was benchmarking Firefox 4 with different browsers, he noticed something with Internet Explorer 9 – Internet Explorer 9 was around 10 times faster than the other browsers in a particular test (math-cordic) in the SunSpider benchmark. While Chrome and Opera scored took around 10ms in that test, Internet Explorer 9 finished it it in about 1ms.
Sayre investigated further by modifying the code for that test used in the SunSpider Benchmark a bit. He made two variations of the test little bits of codes to the original – one by adding a “true” and another by adding a “return”. As these “true” and “return” in this context does not do anything there should be minimal impact.
The result though is startling – Internet Explorer 9 took around 20 times longer with the two new tests compared with the original. While the original took only 1ms in my laptop, the other two took around 20ms each.
Read more: digitizor
While Mozilla engineer Rob Sayre was benchmarking Firefox 4 with different browsers, he noticed something with Internet Explorer 9 – Internet Explorer 9 was around 10 times faster than the other browsers in a particular test (math-cordic) in the SunSpider benchmark. While Chrome and Opera scored took around 10ms in that test, Internet Explorer 9 finished it it in about 1ms.
Sayre investigated further by modifying the code for that test used in the SunSpider Benchmark a bit. He made two variations of the test little bits of codes to the original – one by adding a “true” and another by adding a “return”. As these “true” and “return” in this context does not do anything there should be minimal impact.
The result though is startling – Internet Explorer 9 took around 20 times longer with the two new tests compared with the original. While the original took only 1ms in my laptop, the other two took around 20ms each.
Read more: digitizor