![]() Honestly, we'd call the 4 percent difference between shipping Safari and alpha Chrome imperceptible, and we wonder if the more significant advantages of WebKit nightly builds would be noticeable either-we're talking about a tenth of a second difference on a rather lengthy benchmark. These WebKit results echo those measured by readers who posted SunSpider results in our forums. And last, nightly builds of WebKit are faster still-19 percent faster than Safari 4, and 15 percent faster than the latest Chrome alpha. Our testing revealed a 4 percent advantage, far from the 34 percent that CNET claimed. Second, these early builds of Chrome, and its V8 JavaScript engine, do in fact edge out Safari 4 ever so slightly. First, Firefox 3.6 will definitely have speed gains due to TraceMonkey improvements-our test showed a 12 percent gain on Mac OS X. Advertisementįrom the results we can see a couple things. And since Mozilla is shooting for major JavaScript improvements for Firefox as well, we compared the latest shipping and alpha versions of Firefox, which use the Gecko rendering engine and TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. We thought a comparison with a Safari alpha-essentially, a WebKit nightly-would be more fair. CNET only compared one of these alpha builds of Chromium to the shipping version of Safari. The open source project behind Chrome is called Chromium, which also releases regular alpha test builds. Google's Chrome browser also uses WebKit for rendering, but uses its own V8 JavaScript engine. The WebKit team releases nightly test builds of WebKit + Nitro called, well, WebKit. Safari, Apple's Web browser, is built using the open source WebKit HTML and CSS rendering engine and the Nitro (n?e SquirrelFish Extreme) JavaScript engine. Our own testing reveals that the current alpha builds of Chrome edge Safari 4.0.3 slightly, but WebKit nightly builds are still out ahead of the pack.įirst, it's important to note a couple of things. ![]() The "fastest browser" competition is always evolving: last summer there was a heated race for the title of Mac OS X browser speed champ. ![]() Late last week, CNET declared the latest developer preview release of Chrome 4.0 for Mac OS X was the "fastest OS X browser," citing SunSpider benchmark performance that was 34 percent better than Safari 4.0.3. Given that Chrome for Mac OS X has yet to hit 1.0, we decided to go with the latest nightly builds for both it and Safari (WebKit), as well as the latest Mozilla alpha (3.6a1), Camino beta, and Opera beta. With that in mind, we decided to survey the current browser landscape on Mac OS X to see which offers the best JavaScript performance. ![]() And with Google getting into the browser game with Chrome, all of the developers have stepped up their game. Competition in the browser space breeds better performance. ![]()
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