In these tests the user will just see 60 frames per second in IE9 and Firefox. This difference is artificial and does not affect what users see on the screen, because it's impossible to display more than about 60 frames per second under any normal circumstances - I have previously discussed this on my blog. In these benchmarks, the actual painting is incredibly fast in Firefox and IE9, so the limiting factor is this timeout delay, and IE9 gets 2.5x of our score. In Firefox, delays of zero are clamped to a minimum of 10ms, but in IE9 they're clamped to a minimum of 4ms. That's because these tests animate using setTimeout with a delay of zero, and count how may times the animation callback fires per second. Mr Potato Gun, Preschool and HWACCEL These benefit hugely from the improvements in the builds I linked to above, but our score is still lower than IE9's. GUIMark 2 Flash and HTML5 Some reports show differences between Firefox and IE9 on those benchmarks, but on my laptop their performance is very similar, except for HTML5 Text where Firefox is a bit faster.

The above builds include a tweak for that path, and are slightly faster than IE9 RC1 on my system on this test. Speed Reading This is also drawImage-heavy but exercises a path that wasn't well optimized in our D2D backend.

I added a simple cache to avoid security checks, and fixed other inefficiencies, and the resulting builds are now slightly faster than IE9 RC1 on my system.(Although since both browser get 60fps for 1000 fish, I had to modify the test to use 2000 fish to see any differences.) Firefox 4 RC spends a lot of its time doing security checks for the drawImage call, plus there are some smaller inefficiencies in our drawImage code.

Below I'll explain the details what I've found about various commonly-cited benchmarks, but the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox (as Microsoft would have you believe).įishIE Tank This is one of many 2D canvas demos that focus on drawing images with various transforms. But it's true that some graphics benchmarks consistently report better scores for IE9 than for Firefox, so over the last few days I've been looking into that. As I explained in my last post, Microsoft's PR about 'full hardware acceleration' is a myth.

Test ie9 on mac