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Test Your Browser’s JavaScript Prowess With Google Octane

Facebook and the W3C have contributed greatly to the development of mobile browsers with Ringmark. The simple test makes sure that your browser is compliant with the latest and greatest HTML5 technolo...
Test Your Browser’s JavaScript Prowess With Google Octane
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  • Facebook and the W3C have contributed greatly to the development of mobile browsers with Ringmark. The simple test makes sure that your browser is compliant with the latest and greatest HTML5 technologies. Google has taken that concept and applied it to JavaScript applications.

    Google announced today the immediate availability of Octane. It’s a JavaScript benchmark suite that tests your browser’s ability to handle the most stressful of JavaScript applications. It’s a good idea since JavaScript is quickly becoming more popular thanks to HTML5. Games and other applications make liberal use of JavaScript and people need to be sure that their browser can handle the load.

    Of course, there are JavaScript benchmark suites already out there. What makes Octane different? Google says that old benchmarks were only used to test a specific feature of JavaScript. Octane tests them all with the traditional V8 benchmark suite alongside 5 new benchmarks. Here’s what Octane will test:

  • Box2DWeb runs a JavaScript port of a popular 2D physics engine that is behind many well-known simulations and web games.
  • Mandreel puts a JavaScript port of the 3D Bullet Engine to the test with a twist: The original C++ source code for the engine is translated to JavaScript by Onan Games’ Mandreel compiler, which is also used in countless web-based games.
  • Pdf.js is based on Mozilla’s PDF reader and shows how Javascript applications can replace complex native browser plug-ins. It measures how fast the browser decodes a sample PDF document.
  • GB Emulator is derived from an open source emulator of a famous game console running a 3D demo.
  • CodeLoad measures how quickly a JavaScript engine can bootstrap commonly used JavaScript libraries and start executing code in them. The source for this test is derived from open source libraries.
  • You can run the Octane benchmark here. It will run 13 tests in total with each one giving you a base score. The final score will be the geometric mean of all the previous scores.

    I ran a few tests myself and found some interesting results. Chrome returned a score of 14,705 whereas the latest version of Firefox returned a score of 8,582. Google says that Octane can run on mobile browsers, but it crashed my phone when I tried running it on the latest version of Firefox mobile. To be fair, it’s probably crashed because my phone is old and terrible. If you have a newer phone, it will probably work just fine. Just don’t expect any kind of amazing results.

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