Benchmark: Measure Text Methods 2

HTML Preparation code:

<div id="my-div">Hello World</div>

Script Preparation code:

const canvas = document.createElement('canvas')
window.context = canvas.getContext('2d')
window.mydiv = document.createElement('canvas');
window.mydiv.innerHTML = "Hello world";

Tests:

offsetWidth
mydiv.offsetWidth
getBoundingClientRect
mydiv.getBoundingClientRect().width
canvas
window.context.measureText('Hello world')

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
offsetWidth
getBoundingClientRect
canvas

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 28 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the provided JSON data to explain what is tested, compare options, and discuss pros and cons of each approach.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark measures three different methods for measuring the width of a single string of text:

1. `offsetWidth` (using the `mydiv.offsetWidth` property)
2. `getBoundingClientRect().width` (using the `window.mydiv.getBoundingClientRect()` method)
3. `canvas` (using the `window.context.measureText('Hello world')` method)

**Library and Purpose**

* None of the test cases rely on a specific JavaScript library.

However, it's worth noting that the benchmark uses the HTML5 Canvas API (`window.context`) to measure text width in the third test case. The Canvas API is a 2D drawing API that provides low-level control over rendering graphics on the screen.

**JavaScript Features and Syntax**

None of the test cases use special JavaScript features or syntax that would be unfamiliar to most software engineers.

**Options Compared**

The three options are compared in terms of their performance, with the goal of determining which method is the fastest. The benchmark provides raw execution counts per second for each option on a specific device (Mac OS X 10.15.7, Chrome 101).

**Pros and Cons of Each Approach**

Here's a brief summary:

1. **`offsetWidth`**:
	* Pros: Simple and widely supported; can be used with many HTML elements.
	* Cons: May not be accurate for all types of text (e.g., non-rectangular shapes) or fonts (e.g., sans-serif).
2. **`getBoundingClientRect().width`**:
	* Pros: More accurate than `offsetWidth`, as it measures the bounding rectangle's width, which can account for text layout.
	* Cons: Requires additional computation and may be slower due to the additional method call.
3. **`canvas` (using `measureText`)**:
	* Pros: Highly accurate, as it uses the Canvas API's built-in text measurement capabilities.
	* Cons: May require more setup and context creation compared to other methods.

**Other Considerations**

When choosing a method for measuring text width, you should also consider factors such as:

* Browser compatibility
* Text rendering engine (e.g., Blink vs. Gecko)
* Font support and rendering quality

In this benchmark, the Canvas API method (`canvas`) appears to be the fastest on the specific device tested, but it's essential to evaluate performance in different contexts and browsers.

**Alternatives**

Other alternatives for measuring text width include:

* Using a CSS grid or flexbox layout
* Implementing a custom text measurement algorithm (e.g., using SVGs)
* Utilizing other APIs like `window.getComputedStyle()` with the `width` property

These alternatives might offer better performance, accuracy, or compatibility in specific scenarios, but their implementation and complexity can vary significantly.

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 2 years ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.64 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 101 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
offsetWidth	11252028.0 Ops/sec
getBoundingClientRect	3933157.2 Ops/sec
canvas	1293524.2 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

Measure Text Methods 2 (version: 0)

Using various methods to measure a single string of text.

Comparing performance of: offsetWidth vs getBoundingClientRect vs canvas

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

offsetWidth

getBoundingClientRect

canvas

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 28 days ago):