JSmol/Rotation Speeds

In December, 2015:

• Firefox and Safari outperform all other popular browsers for smoothness and speed of rotation, and therefore are the recommended browsers for websites that use JSmol such as Proteopedia and FirstGlance in Jmol.

• Chrome and Opera rotate molecules in JSmol about 4-fold slower than Firefox (or Safari) for cartoon rendering, and almost 2-fold slower for spacefilled rendering. That is, they generate fewer frames/second, so rotation or spinning is less smooth or more jerky.

• Edge (the new browser in Windows 10) is almost 4-fold slower than Firefox for both cartoon and spacefilled renderings.

• Internet Explorer 11 gives unacceptably slow rotation of molecules in JSmol, with a performance about 9-fold slower than that of Firefox.

Historical note: In 2014, Chrome outperformed Firefox. Changes in Chrome in 2015 reduced its performance for rotating molecules in JSmol. In December, 2015, a change in Chrome (first in version 47) made it unable to rotate molecules in JSmol satisfactorily. As the mouse moved, the molecule remained fixed until the mouse movement stopped, whereupon the molecule jumped to the final position in one step. Bob Hanson was able to work around the change in Chrome with a modification to JSmol, but frames/second are still poorer than they were in Chrome in 2014.

• The Jmol Java applet is only 1.4-1.8 fold faster in Firefox, but 20-fold faster in Internet Explorer.

Data (December, 2015)

JSmol (Javascript)

Tests below were done in FirstGlance in Jmol in the default HTML5/javascript mode. In order to slow down rotation to enable manual counting of frames/second, a large molecule was used: 1g3i, a single model with 45,528 atoms (which puts it in the largest ~2% of entries in the PDB). Tests were done in a browser window approximately 1,900 x 1000 pixels on a late 2014 MacBook Pro (2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 with 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM). Windows 10 was a virtual machine (VMware) on the Mac, running at native speed on the Mac's Intel processor. With spinning on, the number of frames in 10 or 20 sec was counted and used to calculate frames/second. Browsers were the versions current in December, 2015.

Frames/Second in Cartoon, Spacefill JSmol without Java
Operating System	Firefox	Safari	Chrome	Internet Explorer 11	Edge	Opera	Maxthon	Torch*
Windows 10	3.9, 4.3	n/a	1.05, 2.7	0.45, 0.45	1.1, 1.25	1.0, 2.4	1.5, 2.5	1.6, 3.0
Mac OS 10.10.5	4.2, 4.1	4.0, 3.3	1.05, 2.95	n/a	n/a	(failed)	4.2, 3.5	n/a

"n/a": not available.
* Despite a high review, Torch seems a rather iffy browser. It is accused of hijacking and does not identify itself in navigator.userAgent.

Jmol (Java applet)

Because Java is so much faster than Javascript, the spinning was further slowed by clicking the "Zoom Larger" button in FirstGlance twice.
(Torch does operate Java in Dec. 2015.)

Frames/Second in Cartoon JSmol without Java - Jmol Java applet
Operating System	Firefox	Safari	Chrome	Internet Explorer 11	Edge	Opera	Maxthon
Windows 10	3.2, 4.7	n/a	No Java	0.3, ~7	no Java	n/d	0.2,
Mac OS 10.10.5	3.3, 6	3.0, ~7	no Java	n/a	n/a	(failed)	No Java

"n/a": not available. "n/d": not determined.