How to Benchmark Your Favorite Web Browsers

Only a few days ago, the new Firefox Quantum has arrived on the browsers scene. Everyone is excited and talking about it. Mozilla is claiming that Firefox Quantum is the new champion of the web browsers world, but others want to to see it for themselves. The way you can find out for yourself is by running some of the benchmarks in your web browser yourself. If Firefox Quantum scores better than the older versions of Firefox, or than the Google Chrome then we will know. So here is how you can benchmark your favorite web browser in your own PC.

First of all you have to close down all the applications running in your PC so that they do not interfere with the web browser. You might be tempted to launch Windows in safe mode, but graphics drivers are not loaded in the safe mode and might interfere in benchmark. All browsers should be benchmarked on the same PC.

Another thing you should do is download the latest version of the web browsers and create new user profiles for each. This is done to prevent any extensions installed in your browser profile from being loaded and interfering with the tests.

Once these steps have been taken, launch only one browser at a time and run the following tests. After tests are complete, use the Task Manager to make sure all of the browser processes are terminated before you can process with another web browser. Here are the popular benchmarks for all modern web browsers:

  1. JetStream – It is a JavaScript  benchmark suite with a focus on the advanced web applications. It was originally developed by Apple and contains a range of tests including cryptography functions, graphics, sorting algorithms and more.JetStream Browser Benchmark
  2. ARES 6 – It measures the execution time of JavaScript’s newest features, including symbols, for-of, arrow functions, Map/Set/WeakMap, let/const, classes, proxies, string interpolation, destructuring, default arguments, spread, tail calls, and generators. ARES-6 is comprised of four sub-tests: Air, Basic, Babylon, and ML.ARES 6 Browser Benchmark
  3. Speedometer – It is a browser benchmark that measures the responsiveness of Web applications. It uses demo web applications to simulate user actions such as adding to-do items. Speedometer Browser Benchmark
  4. MotionMark – This is a graphics benchmark that measures a browser’s capability to animate complex scenes at a target frame rate.MotionMark Browser Benchmark
  5. Octane – Developed by Google, it is a JavaScript test that includes tests that focus on interactive scripting. This benchmark has been retired and is no longer maintained by Google. You can run both Octane 2.0 and Octane 1.0.Octane Browser Benchmark
  6. Basemark Web 3.0 – Very advanced and comprehensive  web browser benchmark that tests how your browser can handle the modern web apps. It even tells how the browser’s performance is going to impact your notebook computer’s battery.Basemark Browser Benchmark

All of these benchmarks have their own way of displaying the scores. In some of these benchmarks the higher scores are considered good while in other the lower scores are taken to be better. So make sure you note these things down before beginning a particular benchmark. Usually, you need to run only one benchmark on all of your web browsers to see which of them performs better.