Browser Wars: Apple’s Safari 4
With Apple’s latest WWDC developer conference event held earlier this week, most of their announcements were of course overshadowed by news of the latest iPhone 3GS. Amidst some other major announcements such as Mac OSX SnowLeopard, and some shiny new MacBook Pro’s, Apple also released the latest version of their Safari web browser. Bringing it up to version 4, along with the status of “the fastest browser in the world”.
Apple claims that the software has a 53% faster JavaScript engine than the preceding version 3.1. Although Firefox 3 RC3 was the first to deliver significant JavaScript performance improvement, Apple apparently is exceeding those gains with Safari 4, using a new and improved JavaScript interpreter code-named SquirrelFish, which is provided on an open-source basis from the WebKit project, the same organization that makes the open-source engine used by Safari to render web pages. According to the WebKit project, the SquirrelFish engine is 1.6 times faster than the JavaScript engine in Safari 3.1.
Why is JavaScript performance important you might ask? Well most today’s web applications and web 2.0 sites rely on the JavaScript scripting language (originally created by current Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich while he was employed by Netscape). JavaScript acts as glue that connects a user interface rendered in a web browser with a database and programming logic running in a web server. The browser’s JavaScript engine is solely responsible for interpreting and executing JavaScript commands embedded in HTML code. As a result, a browser’s JavaScript engine performance is directly related to the performance and responsiveness of a web application, contributing to the user experience.
The fact that many applications grow in size and become more bloated with each release means that a browser that can run web applications faster and make user interfaces more responsive on any computer is a big deal for the end user.
While Google’s Chrome browser has also undergone some rapid updates and performance increases since release, the other big question is how can Microsoft’s IE8 compete? Currently in beta 1 phase, IE8 is expected to deliver speed gains in JavaScript performance as well. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still remains the overall leader in terms of usage in the browser market, however it still significantly trails it’s 3 major competitors in performance and features. The fact that the software giant is often criticised for delivering bloated and inefficient software certainly doesn’t help. Tests of the first beta of IE8 show no noticeable speed gains in running web applications and more often than not it is actually the opposite, with website and web applications running noticeably slower compared to IE7.
Along with dramatic user interface improvements to the Windows version of Safari 4, other new features include a revamped “Topsites” feature and making great use of CoverFlow for browsing through your bookmarks or current tabs with maximum eye candy.
You can checkout the 150 new features and try them out yourself by downloading the new Safari 4 from Apple.
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