ThreeTags Browser Speed Test

As mentioned in the outline of ThreeTags Security and Encryption architecture, client-side encryption is a CPU-heavy operation that puts a lot of load on the browser’s JavaScript engine.

Fortunately, the recent advances in web browsers’ performance, spurred by Google’s introduction of Google Chrome and its promotion as the fastest web browser, make our job easier. Google has essentially started a browser performance war that directly benefits rich internet applications such as ThreeTags.

There are various benchmarks designed to measure a web browser’s performance. As client-side encryption is a rather unique feature of our service that is not directly addressed in those tests, we have designed our own browser speed test, focused on what we do: client-side encryption. Any user of ThreeTags free service can select [Tools->Browser Speed Test] menu to test the speed of their browser.

This is the result of our browser speed test (shorter is better):

ThreeTags Browser Speed Test, ms

The test consists of encrypting a 100k piece of text. The numbers above are average results of several tests run on a Windows 7 (64 bit) PC with AMD Phenom 9750 QuadCore 2.4GHz CPU and 8Gb of RAM. Please note that at least one second is consumed by updating the UI, so actual encryption takes less than 2 seconds in Google Chrome, for example.

For the sake of general interest, below are the results of the same test we did on different machines:

Mac Mini (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz, 1Gb RAM), OS X Leopard:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3: 3,479ms
• Apple Safari 4.0.3: 3,713ms

Lenovo ThinkPad T61 (Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz, 1Gb RAM), Win XP Pro:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3: 2,917ms
• Google Chrome 3.0: 2,932ms
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0: 371,138ms (yes, IE6 is more than 100x slower than FF & Chrome)

Acer Aspire 1810T Netbook (Intel Atom Z520 1.33GHz, 1Gb RAM), Win XP Pro:

• Google Chrome 3.0: 8,042ms
• Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3: 8,148ms
• Apple Safari 4.0.3: 11,600ms
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0: 35,491ms

We did not have a Linux machine to test on. If you have one, please let us know the results in comments below.