A few weeks ago Vlad had the chance to do performance tests across a variety of different devices. He’s picked up a Droid as part of his Android work, also has access to an N900, and I also know he’s proud to admit that’s he’s a Zune HD owner.
Firefox for Mobile has been getting excellent reviews for features and functions. We also have good numbers for JS performance, an important component of building compelling web applications on mobile.
Mobile Sunspider Performance – Click for a Larger Version.
The Android browser doesn’t use V8 (yet). It uses the old (pre-v8 days) WebKit Javascript engine.
The browser on the Droid, which is based on Android 2.0, seems to use V8 as best I can tell. Either V8 or jsc can be selected at build time. Before this, I believe all Android phones used jsc.
@Vlad — sorry, no, Droid doesn’t use v8. As you say, it’s in the open source Android source tree, and can be enabled, but it’s off by default. If I recall correctly, it’s off because currently performance is actually worse than if it is enabled, due to slow page load times. V8 is not currently optimized for mobile ARM web browsers.
Even though it’s listed on the chart, it’s probably worth noting that these phones run on different processors, which obviously has a huge impact.
Probably the most fair test would be seeing the Motorola Droid, Nokia N900, and the Palm Pre all side-by-side, since they all run on the same processor (TI OMAP3 3430).