It’s been about a year and a half since my last test of AS3 versus JavaScript and there have been several major releases of both browsers and the Flash Player. Today, we pit every major browser against each other and Flash Player itself to get an updated picture of which provides the fastest scripting environment on the web.

Since last time, the following releases have occurred:

Platform Last Test Today’s Test
Flash Player 11.1.102.55 11.6.602.180
Opera 11.52 12.14
Safari 5.0.4 discontinued
Chrome 15.0.874.120 26.0.1410.43
Firefox 8.0.0.4325 20.0

I performed all of these tests in the same environment as last time except for the version of the Flex SDK used:

  • ASC 2.0 build 352231 (-debug=false -verbose-stacktraces=false -inline)
  • 2.8 Ghz Intel Xeon W3530
  • Windows 7

I assign “points” to each platform based on its performance ranking on each test. There are five platforms in this test, so the first place platform gets five points, the second platform gets four points, and so on. Say there is a three-way tie for first place. In that case, each tying platform gets five points and the next-best platform gets two points and the platform after it gets one point.

Here are the points awarded:

Platform JavaScript (Firefox 20.0) JavaScript (IE 10.0.9200.16521) JavaScript (Chrome 26.0.1410.43) JavaScript (Opera 12.14) AS3 (Flash 11.6.602.180)
Test 1 2 3 5 4 1
Test 2 5 3 1 4 2
Test 3 3 1 3 5 5
Test 4 2 1 3 5 5
Test 5 4 4 1 4 5
Test 6 4 4 5 4 4
Test 7 4 4 5 1 4
Test 8 4 2 5 1 4
Test 9 5 3 5 3 1
Test 10 4 3 5 2 1
Test 11 5 3 4 3 1
Test 12 5 3 5 3 3
Total 47 34 47 39 36

AS3 vs. JavaScript Performance Chart (April 2013)

To compare these results to the results from November 2013, let’s look at percentile of each platform’s points:

Product Last Test Today’s Test
Flash Player 100% 77%
Opera 79% 83%
Chrome 100% 100%
Internet Explorer 75% 72%
Firefox 91% 100%

Google Chrome now shares the #1 rank with Firefox instead of Flash Player. Flash Player has sadly (for AS3 and Flash fans) fallen to the second-slowest rank despite a brand-new compiler (ASC 2.0) and five major releases. Elsewhere, Internet Explorer’s long-awaited major 10.0 release wasn’t enough to keep up with the competition as it continues to occupy last last. Opera improved a little, but it should improve massively soon when it switches to the new “Blink” fork of WebKit in an upcoming release along with Chrome. Sharing a JavaScript engine with the co-fastest browser can’t hurt.

As usual, the above test is only a simple test suite from oddhammer.com and not a comprehensive test of all features under all conditions. As such, I recommend viewing the above results only as a broad perspective on overall performance. For specific performance characteristics, check out the other AS3 and JavaScript articles on this site and stay tuned for plenty more!

Raw data spreadsheets: Open Document Format (ODS) , Excel (XLS).

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