Google Launches the new Speedometer 3.0 Browser Benchmark Together with Apple and Firefox

Google has long used Speedometer as its benchmark, claiming that when measuring JavaScript performance, it is the “most reflective of the real world.” There is now a Speedometer 3.0 available.

The browser engines Blink/V8, Gecko/SpiderMonkey, and WebKit/JavaScriptCore collaborated (joint multi-stakeholder governance approach) to create Speedometer 3.0, with Microsoft also participating. The WebKit team released version 1.0 in 2014, and in 2018, Apple and Google partnered to create version 2.0.

“create a shared understanding of web performance so that improvements can be made to enhance the user experience.”  is the stated objective. “Speedometer captures and calculates scores, show more detailed results and introduce an even wider variety of workloads.”all of which are improved in this most recent version.

While not every test or task can replicate the entire internet, we have developed a set of selection criteria that are essential to the user experience when developing Speedometer 3. Now more than ever, a representative benchmark is in reach.

Speedometer 3.0 considers the following frameworks: Backbone, Svelte, Lit, Angular, Preact, Vue, and React.

A new collection of simulated workloads has been added, which includes code editors, sophisticated web pages, news sites with only one page, to-do apps, and dashboards with charts.

“TodoMVC is a to-do application that allows a user to keep track of tasks. The user can enter a new task, update an existing one, mark a task as completed, or delete it.”

“We chose a news site to represent a SPA, since it allows us to capture the main areas of interest in a deterministic way. An important factor was that we want to ensure we are using static local data and that the app doesn’t rely on network requests to present this data to the user.”

“Charting apps allow us to test SVG and canvas rendering by displaying charts in various workloads.”

“Editors, for example WYSIWYG text and code editors, let us focus on editing live text and capturing form interactions.”