There are many things that can fall into the broad category of “performance.” The flavor of the month, as of late, has been “JavaScript performance,” perhaps because it’s so easy to get numbers from various test suites that can be used to compare browsers. The major advances that browsers have been making in the last few years enable a whole class of web apps that were previously unthinkable.

But we care about many other things that could fall into the performance bucket, like the time it takes the browser to start up, which has an obvious impact on the user’s experience, especially on mobile where the browser tends to start and stop more often than desktop. Another fairly obvious performance metric is page load speed, something the user will see feel every time they use the browser.

Besides measuring how long things take to happen, we also care about how much space browsers take while doing it, both in terms of disk space and memory. Finally there are some things that are traditionally harder to measure, such as responsiveness.

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