Run the benchmark at robohornet.org
Learn how to get involved
RoboHornet is predicated on a simple truth: if there's a popular benchmark, browser vendors will compete to win it. But up until today, benchmarks' power as a social tool has rarely been capitalized on. First of all, writing good benchmarks is hard. In practice, most benchmarks today were written by browser implementors to help them chart their performance — but the issues they picked aren't necessarily important to real web developers. Second, evangelizing a benchmark takes a lot of effort, and a benchmark is only as powerful as the social weight behind it. That's where RoboHornet comes in.
The goal of the RoboHornet benchmark is to distill the collective will of the web development community to get browser vendors to fix real-world performance pain points. RoboHornet is an aspirational benchmark that sketches out a better future based on the performance pain of today.
Why the name RoboHornet? Individual hornets, like web developers who evangelize for their pet performance problems, are annoying at best. But when they act as a part of a larger swarm, they can wield considerable power. And the "Robo" part? That should be self evident: robots are cool.
Every benchmark in the suite is designed to capture a performance pain point in a measurable way, such that an improvement in the benchmark's speed represents a lessening of felt pain. Any performance pain point is fair game—not just the ones that involve JavaScript. The suite uses a novel scoring system to represent the overall score as intuitively as possible. The community proposes performance painpoints to highlight and votes on which ones affect them most. A small group of stewards then distills the community's desires into regular, curated updates to the benchmark suite, allowing it to grow and evolve over time.
Ultimately RoboHornet will be owned by the broader community. That's why we're open sourcing it in this early alpha state. The list of stewards already includes representatives from many popular frameworks and applications, but ultimately RoboHornet isn't a coherent concept without the participation of the broader web community. Check out the guide to community participation to get involved, or run the benchmark yourself at robohornet.org.