Blog - Feature: Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks: is IE9 cheating at SunSpider?

Feature: Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks: is IE9 cheating at SunSpider?

Friday, November 19th, 2010 Blog by Mint News

The SunSpider JavaScript performance benchmark, devised by the developers of the WebKit browser engine, is used and quoted widely as a measure of browser scripting performance. A surprising result was recently noticed by a Mozilla developer, Rob Sayre, looking at Internet Explorer 9′s performance in this test. On one of the many subtests it performs, Internet Explorer 9 was finishing the subtest almost instantly.

In and of itself, that’s not necessarily very interesting; several of the subtests in SunSpider are near-instant in the browser. However, it piqued the developer’s curiosity. He made some minor changes to the test—changes that don’t alter the result of the calculation the test performs and that, naively at least, should be treated as equivalent—and saw Internet Explorer 9 slow down considerably. He filed a bug against Internet Explorer.