At the end of last year (2015) we had performance numbers of Firefox compared to the other browser vendors in the shell and on windows 8 and Mac OSX in the browser on different hardware.
This opened requests for better information. We didn’t have any information if Firefox on windows was slower compared to other OS on the same hardware. Also we got requests to run Windows 10 and also to compare to the Edge browser.
Due to these request we decided to find a way to run all OS on the same specification of hardware. In order to do that we ordered 3 mac mini’s and installed the latest flavors of Windows, Mac OSX and Ubuntu on it. Afterwards we got our AWFY slave on each machine and started reporting to the same graph.
Finally we have Edge performance numbers. Their new engine isn’t sub-par with other JS engines. It is quite good! Though there are some side-notes I need to attach to the numbers above. We cannot state enough that Sunspider is actually obsolete. It was a good benchmark at the start of the JS performance race. Now it is mostly annoying, since it is testing wrong things. Not the things you want to/should improve. Next to that octane is still a great benchmarks, except for mandreel latency. That benchmark is totally wrong and we notified the v8 team about it, but we got no response so far. (https://github.com/chromium/octane/issues/29). It is quite sad to see our hard work devalued due to other vendors gaming on that benchmark.
We also have performance across OS for the first time. This showed us our octane score was lower on windows. Over the last few months we have been rectifying this. We still see some slower cold performance due to MSVC 2015 being less eager in inlining fuctions. But our jit performance should be similar across platform now!