IPhone 3GS JavaScript Performance Blows Away Rivals, Approaches MacBook Speed | Hacker News Reader

IPhone 3GS JavaScript Performance Blows Away Rivals, Approaches MacBook Speed

techcrunch.com

25 pointsgibsonf19 comments

"Approaches MacBook Speed"? It's 12x slower. That's like saying "bicycles approach speed of TGV" (25 vs 300km/h) when comparing them to walking.

And my car's speed approaches that of an SR-71.

Sure, it is fast for a mobile device, but it is still damn slow compared to a "real" computer.

If 12x slower than safari, that means it's probably already faster than IE7. So maybe it isn't approaching Macbook speed, but it is approaching, or meeting, desktop browser speeds.

I'm really tired of MG Siegler's posts he is far from accurate on his statements (even about Twitter), HN please add a author field.

If it's 12x slower than Safari on a MacBook, I bet it's already faster than IE, which would be impressive.

So, as a curiosity, I decided to run the SunSpider benchmarks on my MacBook Pro 2.4GHz 4GB RAM machine. Safari fared better at 1.1 sec. Firefox 3.5RC hit 1.4 sec. Then I downloaded Firefox 2. 13.2 sec for Firefox 2 on my MacBook Pro. So, the Phone 3GS might not hit MacBook speed with Safari, but it fares very well against a browser that many of us used not so long ago.

It isn't like Firefox 2 is some terrible browser and since Firefox 2 is handily able to execute the JavaScript contained in most pages on a MacBook Pro, it stands to reason that JavaScript performance shouldn't be a barrier on the iPhone on current generation web stuff. Granted, I'm sure Google and others would like to push the envelope, but it's good to see that mobile browsers aren't so behind.

Why on earth would you install Firefox 2? Firefox 3 has been out for a year, and 3.5 is a release candidate.

Interestingly though, a casual browse through the Pre's software that Palm have so far put up shows it's using the webkit engine from Safari3.2. With the various iPhone hardware and software combos present, it gets a bit more interesting. The original 3G with the numerous js and render engine improvments keeping pace with the superior on the hardware front Pre. With firmware 2.2 (probably) using the same Safari 3.2 engine as the Pre, it gets a pasting from the hardware improvements.

Also impressive is that the improvement in speed from the software upgrade is only a tiny bit less than the improvement in speed from hardware...

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