I study visualization websites frequently, and found Chrome much faster than other browsers (among all stable releases). Example page (not sure how well written): http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/force.html

Chrome 10.0.648 certainly does better than Firefox 4.0.1, when running on Ubuntu, for the example you gave.

This has also been my experience; I don't know what these benchmarks are doing, but Chrome is still the fastest in my perception.

Also, the article doesn't mention OS used for the tests. It is certainly of importance since the performance on Firefox 4.0.1 certainly suffers on Linux and Win XP, versus Windows 7 -- which makes the comparison unfair, and a good benchmark would certainly mention results on multiple OSes.

It shouldn't matter much.

The test was just a javascript-engine test, this test does not do any rendering by itself.

I agree; throughout the development of Clojure Atlas (which uses Raphael and arborjs heavily), I've observed this rough ranking:

Chrome > IE >= Safari > Firefox

Make sure you're using mozRequestAnimationFrame() and not setInterval(). This is by far the commonest reason for slow performance in Firefox 4.x. I looked through your source and found only setInterval(), so that may be the problem.

Is there a way to analyze which server (CDN) delivers the same content faster?