I have been playing with Windows 7, and have been excited about having 64 bit application to play with. I decided to have a look and see if that 64 bit power was going to make a difference in my browsers, so I want to celtickane.com and ran a quick javascript speed test, comparing the different browsers I use for testing. Each browser got 10 consecutive tests, and the results were averaged. I was a bit surprised with my test results, especially how quickly Safari performed (Updated 6/3/2009)

1. Safari 4.0b 32bit        102.2ms
2. Opera 9.64 32bit       224.6ms
3. Opera 10.0b 32bit      242.5ms
4. FF3.5b4 32bit          262.4ms
5. FF3.0.10 32bit         312.4ms
6. FF3.5 64bit            319.6ms
7. IE8 64bit              426.0ms
8. IE8 32bit              452.0ms

Looks like I’ll be sticking to FF3.5 32 bit for my daily browser needs. Safari is nice to play with, but I can’t stand the way it renders text. Everything just seems too… thick, and therefore unclean. Opera I just can’t stand, and probably for no good reason. It is the most advanced browser out there.

Some test notes:

FF3.5b4 32 was actually around 230ms for 8/10 tests. 2 of 10 tests came up just under 400ms, pushing its number higher
The 64 bit firefox can be found here: http://wiki.mozilla-x86-64.com/Firefox:Download if you’d like to play with it (NOT an official Mozilla build)
IE8 showed no speed difference in compatibility (IE7) mode
IE8 always rounded to a 10ms number, which leads me to believe they cropped the time function to gain a bit of speed (It didn’t work!)
Google Chrome would not even run on my machine. I could not display a single web page anywhere.
Opera and Safari are not available in 64 bit, not even a third party build (that I could find)

System specs

Windows 7 build 7100
Core 2 Quad @ 2.66Ghz
4GB 800MHZ DDR2 Ram
500GB Seagate 7200.11 series hard drive (with updated firmware, because I know someone will mention their performance issue)
ATI 4670 series video card with 1GB video memory