Google updates its V8 Javascript benchmark

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Google has upped the ante in the web browser speed competition by updating its V8 Javascript benchmark and posting modified versions of Apple's Sunspider and Mozilla's Kraken benchmarks.

Google said that benchmarks such as V8, Sunspider and Kraken are "incredibly important for influencing the direction of Javascript engines" and that they have led to dramatic speed increases in the past two years. Google points to the speed of Chrome's Javascript engine as a major selling point for the web browser and said that the update to its V8 benchmark will force Chrome to "get faster in areas that are important to web developers".

Apple's Sunspider benchmark was credited by Google as being the catalyst for the current crop of benchmarks that have pushed browser developers to increase Javascript engine performance, however it said parts of the benchmarking suite have become "less relevant to the web in 2011". So with the latest iteration of Google's V8 benchmark, the internet software development giant added new tests for regular expressions and memory management.

Google modified Sunspider by repeating each test 50 times, which it claims starts to show Chrome's true Javascript performance. While the company admitted that repeating the same "trivial test many times isn't a great solution", it gives developers to some opportunities to optimise their code.

As for Mozilla's Kraken, Google referred to a bug relating to its Javascript audio handling that has made it "less useful and has even (mis)led us to spend time making some irrelevant optimisations in Chrome". Google said that to test Chrome it is now building the Kraken benchmark from Mozilla's code repository rather than relying on the canonical release.

Although the benchmarks from Apple, Google and Mozilla might not be perfect, there's no doubt that they have spurred frantic web browser development that has dramatically improved Javascript engine performance. Google's latest updates to its V8 benchmark suite should motivate competing web browser developers from Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera to go back and tweak their Javascript engines to improve performance. µ