In the latest battle of the ongoing browser wars, Google has released to the open source community a browser benchmark dubbed RoboHornet that aims to test how well browsers handle Web technologies beyond JavaScript. Though the benchmark is still an alpha release, Microsoft has already dismissed it as a mere "micro-benchmark" that fails to represent Web technologies used in the "real world."
Popular browser benchmarks such as Sunspider, Kraken, and Octane test raw JavaScript performance, "which is rarely the bottleneck we have in our apps," according to Paul Irish, a Google Chrome and Web development community leader. "These days, our performance bottlenecks are oftentimes DOM, <canvas> API methods, [and] SVG. Those are our priorities."
Enter RoboHornet, which according to project lead Alex Komoroske "encompasses all aspects of browser performance and everything that matters to Web developers, like performance of layout and localStorage."
RoboHornet, which is actually a modular suite of performance tests, uses the Benchmark.js framework to run and measure tests. Currently, it's "officially" compatible with the five most popular browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera (on Windows), and Safari (on OS X). "At this early alpha stage, RoboHornet is not guaranteed to be compatible with mobile browsers," according to the benchmark's wiki. "Working on mobile is an explicit goal of RoboHornet as the importance of performance of mobile browsers continues to grow."
In its current form, RoboHornet benchmarks browser performance for "major pain points" of jQuery, Google Apps, Google Maps, Ember, Handlebars, and Cappuccino. For example, it measures the speed for adding rows and columns to existing tables; converting a 2D canvas to a data URI; resizing SVGs; table-rendering after innerHTML; scrolling using scrollTop; and localStorage read and write performance.
By turning the benchmark over to GitHub and the open source community, RoboHornet becomes "a living, dynamic benchmark that aims to use the collective efforts of the Web development community and ultimately get browser vendors to fix real-world performance pain points," wrote Komoroske.
