It’s been about seven 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 11.6.602.180 11.9.900.117
Opera 12.14 17.0.1241.53
Chrome 26.0.1410.43 30.0.1599.101
Firefox 20.0 25.0
Internet Explorer 10.0.9200.16521 11.0

I performed all of these tests in a very similar environment as last time:

  • ASC 2.0 build 354071 (-debug=false -verbose-stacktraces=false -inline)
  • 2.8 Ghz Intel Xeon W550
  • Windows 7 SP1 64-bit

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 25.0) JavaScript (IE 11.0) JavaScript (Chrome 30.0.1599.101) JavaScript (Opera 17.0.1241.53) AS3 (Flash 11.9.900.117)
Test 1 3 3 5 5 1
Test 2 5 4 2 2 3
Test 3 4 1 3 3 5
Test 4 4 1 3 3 5
Test 5 1 4 4 4 5
Test 6 3 3 5 5 1
Test 7 3 3 5 5 1
Test 8 2 1 5 5 3
Test 9 4 5 2 2 3
Test 10 3 2 5 5 1
Test 11 1 3 5 5 2
Test 12 1 5 5 5 5
Total 34 35 49 49 35

AS3 vs. JavaScript Performance Followup (November 2013)

To compare these results to previous tests, let’s look at percentile of each platform’s points:

Product November 2012 April 2013 November 2013
Flash Player 100% 77% 71%
Opera 79% 83% 100%
Chrome 100% 100% 100%
Internet Explorer 75% 72% 71%
Firefox 91% 100% 69%

In using the same Blink engine as Google Chrome, Opera has made a huge leap forward in performance and now shares the lead with Google Chrome which maintains the top spot. Firefox has fallen from sharing the top spot to now being on-par with both Flash and Internet Explorer, neither of which substantially improved their performance since the last test. What happened to Firefox? If anyone knows, please let me know in the comments.

To address the “AS3 vs. JavaScript” title of this series of articles, AS3 is now more firmly in the second tier of performers with Firefox and Internet Explorer. Gone are the days where it dominated poor performances by the likes of Internet Explorer delivered a 10x slowdown compared to the fastest performers. Meanwhile, the Blink-powered browsers—Google Chrome and Opera—lead the way with outstanding JavaScript execution speed.

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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