Move over Chrome, Opera now has the fastest JS engine

by: Matt on: December 22nd, 2009

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Most of us know that Opera has been at the forefront of Browser innovation for the longest time, yet remains at the bottom of pile when it comes to desktop browser market share. Its a sad story and even the best of us have a hard time figuring out why this is so. But this doesn’t stop Opera from making major innovations and changes with each new release.

With Opera 10.5 Alpha (Evenes), released today, comes a brand new JavaScript Engine (Carakan) written from scratch, and some major UI changes.

You can read more about the UI changes from Opera Blog, we will focus on the new JavaScript Engine performance.

Before this release Opera had one of the slowest JavaScript engine, after IE8, by a wide margin. Compare to the last release the JavaScript performance improvements done in this release is quite stunning. Webkit (used by Safari and Chrome) has been, for the longest time, de facto JavaScript engine in terms of performance but the latest Opera Alpha JS even beats the webkit nightly builds. But so does the Chrome dev builds. A lot of users might not know this; even though Chrome uses webkit as their rendering engine they have done a lot of JS performance of their own, which is why Chrome outperforms webkit nightly in the latest builds (read more here and here).

Let’s look at the current standing in JS performance according to SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark:

Note: Your mileage may vary depending on the OS and hardware you are using. The above benchmark was done on Windows 7 64bit.

Edit: ~~Typo shows its chrome 2 dev, actually it was Chrome 4 dev (4.0.266.0 to be precise). Will fix it soon~~. Fixed

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Comments:

Shadow14l
12/22/2009

Silly Opera fanboy, you used Chrome 2 Dev. The latest version is Chrome 4 Dev, so please try again with more accurate results ;)
Pavs
12/22/2009

Shadow, you are right. It was a mistake on my part, we actually used Chrome 4 dev. I will correct it.

Thanks for pointing it out.
Shadow14l
12/22/2009

Oh, well then if you really did use Chrome 4 Dev, than I am a bit impressed as to Opera’s performance. But I am not worrying, Google will gladly expend thousands of more dollars to get back on top =P
Shadow14l
12/22/2009

***** But then, then again isn’t that Opera’s pre-alpha release? :O Wouldn’t that be like comparing Lemons to Limes? (Chrome’s “pre-alpha” next version might be just as fast xD)
Pavs
12/22/2009

Shadow, Chrome devs are nightly builds (with auto updates). They are the latest and best Chrome has to offer. To the best of my knowledge there are no Chrome Alphas.
Shadow14l
12/22/2009

True true, but I’m sure this will remove the hesitance for Chrome to release some better capabilities. But you have to remember that this is only one test on one operating system, maybe throw up a few more operating systems (either to prove your or my point).

I’d have to say it’s healthy competition at this level. If it wasn’t for competition, none of any of this would be here, let alone these 50 ms speed differences.

Well anyways Merry Christmas Pavs.
pebbil
12/22/2009

Silly Chrome fanboy.
Relgoshan
12/22/2009

Absurdly fast so far. They said it’s been more than 18mos in development, this Carakan engine. Bear in mind also that Opera has had a fast draw and smooth interface to keep it feeling “slick”; only now the graphical portion is 3x faster in software, and written to permit adding hardware acceleration later.
Kai
12/22/2009

@Relgoshan: And from what I heard in their blog, they haven’t even enabled acceleration for Vega :)
Pavs
12/22/2009

Shadow, Opera 10.50 alpha also out performs chrome/safari/webkit nightly under OSX and vista 32bit. I can’t check it under linux, because they didn’t release any binary yet for linux.

You can also run the benchmark yourself, it takes only few minutes.

Happy Holidays.
Kai
12/22/2009

@Pavs: And it outperforms them on Windows 7 as well. Speaking of that, the Windows 7 integration is also very nice.
7Red
12/23/2009

I ran the test on Windows 7, 32bit. No other tabs, no other apps running and I came in at 575.2ms.

Running the test with more tabs open has no significant effect on the result , as I tested it with 4tabs open and got 573.8ms

Even having Winamp, uTorrent and Spotify running in the background has no god damn significant effect: 587.8ms
Luis
12/24/2009

Your are comparing oranges to apples. Webkit is not a javascript engine, it is a rendering engine. The competing javascript engines today are:

1) Chrome’s V8
2) Mozila’s Tracemonkey
3) Safari’s Nitro
4) Opera’s Carakan

Currently Chrome’s V8 is the fastest, but Opera’s Carakan is coming closer with an outstanding alpha release. It seems that Safari’s Nitro is in the same league, while Mozila’s Tracemonkey, despite some bragging about being the fastest, is lagging behind by a large margin. IE8’s engine is out of the ball park.
Michael
02/11/2010

Haha. As much as I love Google (and their Chrome browser) it does seem like no-one can really trump Opera – they’ve nearly always been the true pioneers of web browser innovation. Weren’t they the first browser to boast “proper zoom” (ie.: the whole page as oppose to mere text zooming which often broke web layouts and made the page virtually unreadable) also?

I confess I still use Firefox primarily as I find the Google toolbar and various plugins far too helpful, but when I’m not doing work and am merely browsing for fun, I always use Opera.

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