I saw a javascript test of the major browsers at Neowin.net, so I decided to run my own tests.

These are the results:

UPDATE- Firefox 3 Beta 4 is out with and got 5684.4 ms

1. Firefox 3 Beta 4
5684.4 ms (1.80x faster than Opera 9.5 Beta)

2. Opera 9.5 Beta
10258.0 ms (1.28x faster than Firefox 3 Beta 3)

3. Firefox 3 Beta 3
13091.0 ms (1.03x faster than Safari 3 Beta 4)

4.  Safari 3 Beta 4 (Windows)
13514.0 ms (1.6x faster than Firefox 2.0.0.12)

5.  Firefox 2.0.0.12
21568.8 ms (2.01x faster than IE7 x64)

6. Internet Explorer 7 (x64)
43262.0 ms (1.03x faster than the 32-bit version of Internet Explorer)

7.  Internet Explorer 7 (x86)
44657.8 ms (The slowest of them all.)

You can see the full results using the links below.

Firefox 3 Beta 4
Firefox 3 preBeta 4
Opera 9.5 Beta
Firefox 3 Beta 3
Safari 3 Beta 4
Firefox 2.0.0.12
Internet Explorer (x64)
Internet Explorer (x86)

All these were run on my computer at home- 3.4 GHz Pentium 4, 2 gigs of RAM, a really crappy integrated graphics card (GMA950) , XP x64, and with Word 2007 and Notepad running (I’m doing my homework)

Note: I tried Opera 9.26 and the iPod Touch browser, and neither were able to work correctly. My iPod Touch froze, and Opera had a bunch of stuff that returned “NaN”.

Results for Opera 9.26

3/1 Update– The new nightly build of Firefox 3 preBeta 4 is 1.14 times faster than the old one. Download it here.

Results for the 3/1 build

3/6 Update- I downloaded Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, and it is much faster than its predecessor,  and it would take third place in my standings with a time of 11142.8 ms. Full results here.