Today’s article is a followup to an article I wrote in August comparing the performance of AS3 (Flash Player) and JavaScript (various browsers). Since then, two browsers have been updated to new versions and both have claimed speedups in their JavaScript implementations. Today’s article tests those new browser versions to see their speedups in the context of our benchmark: AS3.

Let’s look at an updated version of the performance chart:

AS3 vs. JavaScript performance chart

We can see from this that both Opera 10 and Chrome 3 have achieved better JavaScript performance. Both improvements are merely incremental though, despite the claims that the Opera camp were making. In fact, the speed order remains the same for the most recent versions: Safari, Firefox, Flash, Chrome, IE, Opera. Still, a trend toward faster JavaScript is a good one and it’s nice to be gone of IE7. For now though, we have three clear performance standouts: Safari, Firefox, and Flash. The others are all at least twice as slow as they are.

Raw data as Open Document Format (ODS) or Excel (XLS) format spreadsheet.