Some conclusions:

• Firefox is over-represented: although Firefox has a good 20%+ or so world-wide market share, the 52%+ result here indicates that Firefox users are open to new browser technologies (no surprise there)
• Safari: ditto, although I suspect that some of the Safari visits are indeed Chrome visits before Google Analytics got smart enough to recognize it
• Chrome and Opera: Chrome got even with Opera in two and a half days. That is a statement, and might get Opera people a bit worried about market share.

Stop the presses!

A few hours (like 6) later we have a somewhat different picture!

Chrome gained 7%+ and it seems that my Safari-Analytics-Chrome theory has some substance as Safari is down markedly, while the other players are virtually unchanged.

Day 4: Chrome is second

So we are at day++, and the results are:

Chrome again gained 7%+ and is second only to Firefox, slightly edging out IE. Not bad for a four day older isn’t it?

I run three benchmarks (on the same machine, all browsers open, running the benchmark only in one at a time):

• the V8 Benchmark Suite
• a nice SVG & Canvas speed test
• Sebastien Gruhier’s PGF test page (used earlier in a previous test).

The first test is more JavaScript oriented, where the new V8 virtual machine can shine, the other two test graphical abilities.

And the results are…

The V8 Benchmark Suite results are:

• IE 7.0.5730.11: Score: 16 (Richards: 10; DeltaBlue: 8; Crypto: 23**; RayTrace: 20; EarleyBoyer: 31)
• Opera 9.52 (10108): Score: 102 (Richards: 57; DeltaBlue: 73; Crypto: 65; RayTrace: 142; EarleyBoyer: 290)
• Safari 3.1 (525.13): Score: 59 (Richards: 35; DeltaBlue: 45; Crypto: 50; RayTrace: 81; EarleyBoyer: 116)
• Firefox 3.0.1: Score: 77 (Richards: 78; DeltaBlue: 88; Crypto: 56; RayTrace: 65; EarleyBoyer: 111)
• Chrome 0.2.149.27: Score: 676 (Richards: 858; DeltaBlue: 777; Crypto: 650; RayTrace: 345; EarleyBoyer: 946)

There were significant (cca. 10%) fluctuations in each result, but it is obvious that in this (biased) benchmark Chrome is at least 6.7x faster than the next best, and 42x faster than IE.

The SVG & Canvas results:

• IE 7.0.5730.11: does not support SVG & Canvas, so did not complete
• Opera 9.52 (10108): SVG: 1.657s; Canvas: 1.75s (both beautiful)
• Safari 3.1 (525.13): SVG: 4.312s (edges clipped); Canvas: 1.5945s (beautiful)
• Firefox 3.0.1: SVG: 1.46s; Canvas: 1.095s (both beautiful)
• Chrome 0.2.149.27: SVG: 2.877s (line aliasing and clipping problems); Canvas: 0.993s (beautiful)

Again, there were some fluctuations, but we can conclude two things:

• Canvas is king in speed, and in Canvas Chrome seems to have a very slight edge over Firefox
• Canvas rendering quality is consistent and top notch among the browsers; SVG rendering quality is not consistent

The PGF test page results:

• E 7.0.5730.11: VML: 3390ms (both text and image are missing)
• Opera 9.52 (10108): SVG: 1282ms (image is missing on the right); Canvas: 485ms (both text and image are missing)
• Safari 3.1 (525.13): SVG: 625ms; Canvas: 328ms (text is missing)
• Firefox 3.0.1: SVG: 630ms; Canvas: 385ms (text is missing)
• Chrome 0.2.149.27: SVG: 593ms; Canvas: 281ms (text is missing)

Here Chrome seems to edge out the other browsers slightly, and IE is terribly slow (like it used to be). It is also plain that Canvas support is not complete yet in any of the browsers.

More later…