Javascript Speed Tests

Every so often I think about changing the browser that I routinely use. For the last five years or so I've been using Camino, first on my PowerBook, and now on my MacBook.

Today I decided to try the sunspider-0.9.1 Javascript benchmark on a variety of browsers that I have to hand, and here are the results:

  Camino   2.0.6        3085.3ms
  Chrome   10.0.648.134  319.0ms
  Firefox  3.6.15       1014.6ms
  Firefox  4.0           313.8ms
  Opera    11.01         347.9ms
  Safari   5.0.4         333.7ms

So it seems I am currently using the browser with the slowest Javascript performance (by a factor of almost 10x), and although I've become very used to Camino, maybe it's time to consider a switch (again).

Update 2011-03-22: Added in Firefox 4.0 (which is the current leader, and means that all the alternatives are about 10x faster than Camino in this test).

Setting Camino to be Colour Managed

I've wondered for a while why photos sometimes look a bit washed out in Camino.

It turns out it's because Camino is not observing the embedded colour profiles in the images.

And the way to switch on Colour Management in Camino is:

1. Go to about:config.
2. Set gfx.color_management.enabled to true.

For more information on Colour Management in browsers, see this post: Web Browser Color Management Tutorial.