It’s been about 8 months 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 10.2.154.25 11.1.102.55
Opera 11.01 11.52
Safari 5.0.4 5.1.1
Chrome 10.0.648.204 15.0.874.120
Firefox 4.0.0 8.0.0.4325

Only Internet Explorer was not updated this time as its version number remains exactly the same: 9.0.8112.16521.

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

  • Flex SDK (MXMLC) 4.5.1.21328, compiling in release mode (no debugging or verbose stack traces)
  • 2.8 Ghz Intel Xeon W3530
  • Windows 7

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

Here are the points awarded:

Platform JavaScript (Firefox 8.0.0.4325) JavaScript (IE 9.0.8112.16421) JavaScript (Chrome 15.0.874.120) JavaScript (Safari 5.1.1) JavaScript (Opera 11.52) AS3 (Flash 11.1.102.55)
Test 1 3 4 6 5 3 1
Test 2 6 4 1 2 5 3
Test 3 2 1 4 3 5 6
Test 4 2 1 4 3 5 6
Test 5 6 4 4 1 4 6
Test 6 6 6 2 1 6 6
Test 7 4 2 6 5 1 3
Test 8 3 4 5 2 1 6
Test 9 1 6 5 3 2 4
Test 10 5 5 6 2 1 3
Test 11 4 1 6 2 5 3
Test 12 6 2 4 2 4 6
Total 48 40 53 31 42 53

AS3 vs. JavaScript Performance Chart (November 2011)

To compare these results to the results from March 2011, let’s look at how each platform’s points changed:

Product Last Test Today’s Test
Flash Player 54 53
Opera 44 42
Safari 34 31
Chrome 44 53
Internet Explorer 45 40
Firefox 46 48

Google Chrome is the big winner here as it jumped from 44 points to 53. Firefox made a marginal gain of two points to go from 46 to 48 points. Both of these gains were at the expense of all the other platforms, which all lost ground. Of these, Flash Player fared the best by only slipping from 54 to 53 points and Internet Explorer, the only platform to not update during this cycle, fared the worst by dropping from 45 to 40 points.

Overall, Flash Player and Google Chrome are now tied for first place by a solid margin over second-place Firefox, which I’ll call the top tier of speed. Making up the second tier of speed is Internet Explorer and Opera. Alone in the third tier is the slowest by a wide margin: Safari.

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).

Spot a bug? Have a suggestion? Post a comment!