Facebook and the W3C have contributed greatly to the development of mobile browsers with Ringmark. The simple test makes sure that your browser is compliant with the latest and greatest HTML5 technologies. Google has taken that concept and applied it to JavaScript applications.
Google announced today the immediate availability of Octane. It’s a JavaScript benchmark suite that tests your browser’s ability to handle the most stressful of JavaScript applications. It’s a good idea since JavaScript is quickly becoming more popular thanks to HTML5. Games and other applications make liberal use of JavaScript and people need to be sure that their browser can handle the load.
Of course, there are JavaScript benchmark suites already out there. What makes Octane different? Google says that old benchmarks were only used to test a specific feature of JavaScript. Octane tests them all with the traditional V8 benchmark suite alongside 5 new benchmarks. Here’s what Octane will test:
You can run the Octane benchmark here. It will run 13 tests in total with each one giving you a base score. The final score will be the geometric mean of all the previous scores.
I ran a few tests myself and found some interesting results. Chrome returned a score of 14,705 whereas the latest version of Firefox returned a score of 8,582. Google says that Octane can run on mobile browsers, but it crashed my phone when I tried running it on the latest version of Firefox mobile. To be fair, it’s probably crashed because my phone is old and terrible. If you have a newer phone, it will probably work just fine. Just don’t expect any kind of amazing results.