The New Safari 4 Beta and Javascript Speed

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

I just heard about the release of the Safari 4 Beta today and quickly downloaded it on both my Mac and my Windows laptop I use for work. Apple seems to have filled in some slick Chrome functionality for those of us on OSX anxiously awaiting a version for our operating system.

One of the things Apple is touting is that Javascript execution speed has been greatly improved. I decided to run some tests myself to see for sure. I used Google’s V8 Benchmark first on my Mac. I have a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro running at 2.33Ghz with 3Gb of RAM. The greater the number, the faster:

• Safari 4: 1247
• Webkit Nightly (r41176): 1795
• FF 3.0.6: 166

You can see that while it’s nearly 10 times faster than Firefox, it still doesn’t beat WebKit.

Now, for testing on Windows. This is another laptop… a Dell Latitude D630:

• Safari 4: 1580
• Chrome: 1694 2114 (Google’s new Chrome 2 Beta is smoking fast.)
• FF 3.0.5: 184
• Internet Explorer 7: 37.5 (Actually so slow, it popped up the “Terminate slow script?” dialog. Sad.)
• Internet Explorer 6: 35.5

Again, Safari 4 is up there with the leader, Chrome. IE speed is just disgustingly slow. Laughable even.

I’m going to give Safari 4 a try on OS X as my default browser for a while. I’ll still need FF for FireBug but for general browsing I’m going to use Safari. I’m sure going to miss mouse gestures but hopefully that hole will be filled soon.

Note: Edited 3/19/09 to add Google Chrome 2.0 Beta benchmark numbers. Chrome is yet again the speed leader.

Category:

Web Design

Tagged With:

javascript speed test benchmark safari browser

Posted By:

Ian Pitts

Posted:

02/24 at 01:44 PM

Views:

2283

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