After reading Seth Weintraub’s post on how the upcoming versions of Safari are blisteringly fast I decided to download the latest nightly (WebKit r30123) and check it out for myself.
To check the different browser versions I used the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark.
The results were pretty amazing – on Vista the performance times came in at:
Internet Explorer 7 -Â Â 66,870.6ms
Firefox 2.0.0.12 -Â Â Â Â Â Â 34,121.0ms
Firefox 3.0b2 – Â Â Â Â Â 29,293.6ms
Safari 3.04 -Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 21,930.4ms
WebKit r30123 -Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 9,094.2ms
While on OS X:
Flock 1.08 -Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 30,476.8ms
Firefox 3.0b2 – Â Â Â Â Â 10,863.4ms
Safari 3.04 -Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 13,534.0ms
WebKit r30123 -Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 5,720.0ms
That’s pretty spectacular performance – and seeing as I use Safari quite a bit on my iPod Touch, I may just have to switch default browsers for a while to see how I get on with Safari Webkit!
UPDATE – post updated with results for Firefox 3.0b2 on Vista