Apple Announces Speedometer 3.0 Browser Benchmark in Collaboration With Google, Microsoft, Others

Apple's WebKit team has announced the launch of a new Speedometer 3.0 Browser Benchmark tool in collaboration with Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and others.

Apple originally released the Speedometer browser benchmark back in 2014. It then worked with the Google Chrome team to release Speedometer 2.0 in 2018 with updates for the latest frameworks and libraries available at the time. Today's release improves the accuracy of measurement and measures the performance of a wider variety of content.

Where previous Speedometer versions were developed as part of the WebKit project, Speedometer 3.0 has been developed and released under a joint multi-stakeholder governance model including the three major engine browsers: Blink, Gecko, and WebKit, and the repository has received hundreds of open source contributions since the original announcement in December 2022. This collaboration better ensures fairness in measurement and workload composition. And together, the group created a shared vision for the benchmark.




Speedometer 3.0 takes advantage of the fact that all browser engines have adopted the HTML5 event loop model for updating the webpage rendering. It measures test scripts within a requestAnimationFrame callback as "sync" time, and the time to fire zero-delay timer scheduled in a second requestAnimationFrame as "async" time. The test harness has also been rewritten to use modern JavaScript features like modules, native promises, let & const, async & await, and class syntax, which were not widely available at the time Speedometer 1.0 was first written.

Scores have been adjusted so that a typical web browser will get a score in the 20-30 range to start out. This is in anticipation of future performance improvements. Additionally Speedometer 3.0 supports numerous JavaScript frameworks including Angular, Backbone, jQuery, Lit, Preact, React, React+Redux, Svelte, and Vue. Todo implementations written in vanilla JavaScript using ES5, ES6, and web components are also included. In order to ensure the variety of performance scenarios to be tested, Speedometer 3.0 includes 6 simple DOM todo applications and 6 complex DOM todo applications.

Apple also outlines entirely new kinds of applications included with Speedometer 3.0...


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Broader Content
Speedometer 3.0 includes two test apps that mimic typical news sites, built using the popular single page application frameworks Next.js and Nuxt. It emulates user actions such as clicking on menu items and navigating to another page in the single page app setup.



Speedometer 3.0 also includes four charting applications based on Observable Plot, chart.js, React stockcharts, and WebKit's performance dashboards. Observable Plot and React Stockcharts are based on D3 and test manipulating SVG-based graphics. Chart.js and WebKit's performance dashboards test drawing canvas-based graphics.



Finally, Speedometer 3.0 has added two text editing applications: a JavaScript code editor built with CodeMirror and a WYSIWYG editor built with TipTap. In both scenarios, it emulates the steps to create a new editable region, loading a large amount of text, and syntax highlighting or boldening text:

The addition of these new applications dramatically broadens the scope of what Speedometer 3.0 measures, and provide new opportunities for browser engines to optimize a broad spectrum of features like JavaScript, style, layout, graphics, and DOM.
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You can learn more about Speedometer 3.0 here.

Try out the benchmark at the link below...

Try Speedometer 3.0