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Comment by karkisuni | Hacker News Reader

Running Safari 11 on High Sierra and got a 90 on the speedometer 2.0 test referenced. Why are they bragging about a 66?

For reference, ran the test with Firefox Quantum on the same machine and got a 68.

I get 35.82 on Safari 11 on El Capitan. What is your hardware? I wonder if I'm slower because I'm on older hardware, because I'm on an older version of OS X, or both?

My hardware is a Mac Pro (Early 2009), 2.66 GHz quad core Xeon, 32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM, GeForce GT 120 512 MB.

What I get:

  35.82  Safari 11.0 (11604.1.38.1.7)
  34.89  Firefox 57.0b3
  32.01  Chrome 47.0.2526.106
  31.44  Firefox 58.0a1
  26.77  Firefox 55.0.3

I also for comparison gave it a shot on my Surface Pro 4 (Core i7, 2.2 GHz, 16 GB RAM, Intel Iris 540 GPU).

Here are the results for Chrome 60.0.3112.113. Since I was running on battery I tried this at various power mode settings. Here are the results for Chrome 60.0.3112.113 arranged by power mode setting:

  70.18  Best performance
  69.61  Best performance (2nd time)
  68.03  Better performance
  50.84  Recommended
  41.33  Battery saver

There are two runs of "Best performance" because I did the tests in the order best, better, recommended, battery saver, and so all but the first may have benefited from caching from the previous. I ran best again after finishing battery saver to get a run of best that would have the same caching benefit the other may have received.

For Firefox 57.0b3 I get:

  54.34  Best performance
  58.91  Best performance (2nd time)
  57.91  Better performance
  40.51  Recommended
  34.28  Battery saver

Edge on best performance gave 34.69.

I'm on a iMac 2017 with a 3.8ghz i5, so yeah it might due to the newer hardware.

Interesting that Firefox still scores roughly the same as Safari and Chrome on your machine too. I don't understand why they'd make this big fuss.

Their banner graphic says that pre-Quantum Firefox scored 32 runs per minute, so I think it's quite the improvement.

compared to Firefox 52 and Chrome, it's a big improvement.

And Safari isn't available on Ubuntu or Windows, so it scores a 0 on those platforms ;)

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/quantum-performance-test/

Was about to reply with a snarky link to the windows version of Safari but it looks like they've stopped development! Great point.

Super interesting that building WebKit for windows from source is still supported though: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/

Similar results here, Firefox is the slowest one:

- Safari Technology Preview: ~80

- Vivaldi Beta: ~72

- Firefox Beta: ~57

- Firefox Nightly: ~54

With smooth scrolling disabled it's

- Firefox Beta: ~59

- Firefox Nightly: ~57

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