A while back I found a page online that tested browsers’ speeds by using a little piece of javascript to repaint an image several hundred times. (Not reload it over the wire, just repaint) Now I can’t find it, even after searching on several occasions. Has anyone else seen this/knows where it is?
For the record, I don’t remember who was fastest among Gecko/KHTML/Opera, but I watched it in Internet Explorer and gaped at how slow it was—on the order of 10 times as slow, IIRC
There is a Javascript speed test at BenchJS, and there is also the much-talked about Browser Speed test which has test results for various aspects of browser performance. Summary: Opera is the fastest of the common graphical browsers.
Unfortunately, neither of those is what I’m looking for. This was specifically about images, and repainting them over and over again.
As to those two tests, BenchJS I’ve seen before and I like, the Browser Speed Test page I’ve also seen before but I don’t like. It seems like the author really doesn’t know much about the browsers or how they work—if you want to test “CSS speed” you should have the page already loaded and change the stylesheet, not completely reload the page (which requires it to be reparsed, etc.), if you’re loading many small images you should at least mention pipelining, max-persistent-connections-per-server, etc., if you’re testing table layout, you shouldn’t have form controls or other junk on the page… all the things like that. And if you want a real-world test, you shouldn’t restrict yourself to a small, hand-picked sample size, so it doesn’t qualify as that, either.