Posted on Wednesday, November 17 2010 @ 23:27 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Tech Report
writes Mozilla's Rob Sayre has discovered that Microsoft may be cheating in the popular SunSpider JavaScript benchmark:
Where's the incriminating evidence? Well, Mozilla's Rob Sayre reportedly discovered that Internet Explorer 9 somehow completed one of the SunSpider sub-tests about ten times quicker than the competition. He went ahead and modified said sub-test, first adding a "true" to the code, then adding a "return," both useless snippets that should have no impact—and indeed, they reportedly don't in Google Chrome and Opera. In IE9, though, the modified code is said to execute 20 times slower.
Digitizor provides two explanations other than Microsoft cheating. The IE team could also have "unintentionally over-optmized" IE9's JavaScript engine for SunSpider, it says, or this could simply be a bug. The site notes the first possibility is unlikely and the second would raise "a serious question about the robustness of the engine," however.
