Earlier today we reported on the release of Midori 0.2.7 but aside from new features and extensions has the lightweight browser gotten any faster?
Sunspider
It should be noted that the SunSpider benchmarks only measure a browsers JavaScript rendering performance. This, however, is important since most of the sites I visit are JavaScript heavy.
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The tests were ran 3 times in each browser. Each browser had a clean cache and no extensions (bar defaults) enabled. The average results for each browser were as follows: –
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Well that was a bit of a spanner in the works – based on these tests alone it would appear that the latest Midori is slower than its predecessor – but is this so?
Sputnik
The next test sees the browsers battle Google’s ‘Sputnik’ JavaScript Conformance test that tests how well a browser JavaScript adheres to the ‘ECMAScript Language Specification’.
Browser Name: Number of tests failed out of 5246 (less fails = better)
Midori 0.2.7: 187
Midori 0.2.6: 195
Google Chrome 6: 138
Here we see a big improvement in JavaScript conformance which, in theory, should result in Midori rendering/handling more JS correctly.
Acid Test
All 3 browsers, as expected, pass the Acid test with 100/100.
‘Real world’ views
From a ‘real world’ usage perspective the latest Midori does feel a little bit snappier. Previous sites that it would ‘choke’ on loading for a few seconds now appear fluidly.
Conclusion
All of these tests are meaningless if a browser doesn’t work – thankfully Midori does (very well, might I add) however the same caveats will put people off of using it: it’s not the fastest, it has no extensions and still has compatibility problems with some sites (although hacks and tweaks to get around these exist).
I suspect most people could manage just as well with Midori as with Firefox. I suspect a lot of the extensions users ‘can’t live without’ are installed out of habit more than necessity.
Either way give Midori 0.2.7 a whirl – you might just like it.