Is the Web ready for in-car infotainment? A framework for browser performance tests suited for embedded vehicle hardware

After Web applications have successfully found their way to PCs, smartphones and tablets, they are on the verge to be used on in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. One of the often claimed drawbacks of Web applications is their low performance in conjunction with limited resources. We have created a benchmark framework to evaluate the performance of JavaScript in comparison to native code. The framework is designed to take the resource constraints of IVI systems into account. We conclude that general calculation tasks in JavaScript are on the average two to four times slower than native compiled counterparts on embedded vehicle hardware. The factor is independent from the allowed resource limits for each calculation. Using new features for Web applications (e.g. local storage functionality) or making frequent use of recursions there is a significant performance drop in JavaScript. In these cases native code runs up to 10 times faster than their counterparts in JavaScript.