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Safari 4 Released, Claimed "30 Times Faster Than IE7"
CNETNate writes "Apple has released the beta version of Safari 4 for Mac and PC, with claims that its Nitro rendering engine is '30 times faster than IE7,' and three times faster than Firefox 3. Other new features include 'Top Sites,' which shows users the most frequently visited Web pages, 'Full History Search' for searching through not only the URLs and titles of visited pages, but also the complete text within the page itself — something Opera has been doing for a while."
Anyone know if this is a new engine or just Squirrelfish renamed?
Looks like Safari might be the first Acid 3 browser to the market. Opera's version 10 is Acid 3 compliant, but it's still in Alpha testing.
I noted this feature in Opera 10. The results shown in the demos were rather impressive. The web pages had more of a print-layout look to them without the classic trick of relying on images to cover all the content. This has the potential to completely change the look of the web for the better.
I'm still trying to figure out how being able to use Canvas as a style to apply to web elements is useful, but the idea definitely sounds cool. I suppose one could always set a fixed web page background as a canvas, then make it look like they're on an acid trip as they scroll. :-P
I'm downloading the beta now. If it lives up to the hype that Apple is giving it, it will be an amazing piece of software.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Here's the actual claims from Apple's website:
"Using the new Nitro Engine, for example, Safari executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SunSpider.
In addition to superior JavaScript performance, Safari offers top-flight HTML performance -- the best on any platform -- loading pages 3 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and almost 3 times faster than Firefox 3."
I'm not too familiar with either of these benchmarking programs, so I can't really pick at the results too much, but the actual claim is 'up to 30 times faster' which means that for some function it's 30 times faster, but for most it's probably not at that level of magnitude. It seems as though some of this important information was lost in the game of telephone that is internet news.
Also, I'm more interested in how it stacks up against Firefox, Opera, and Chrome. Comparing it to IE7 is a little bit like Ford comparing their new car to a horse and cart. No offense meant to the browser, but from every chart I've seen it's the bottom of the barrel in terms of speed.
http://www.apple.com/safari/features.html - Safari 4 introduces the Nitro JavaScript engine, an advanced bytecode JavaScript engine that makes web browsing even faster. In fact, Safari 4 executes JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1.
On the Apple Safari feature page:
Safari 4 introduces the Nitro JavaScript engine, an advanced bytecode JavaScript engine that makes web browsing even faster. In fact, Safari 4 executes JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1.
As the article sucks, here's some better info.
>Chrome beat them to it.
Not on the Mac, they didn't.
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/mac.html
So if Safari has this great performance, how can the FF figure out how Safari does it?
By heading over to WebKit.org and downloading the open source rendering engine it uses?
Safari has Webkit @ it's core.
FF devs can look @ the Webkit source. FF devs can also look @ the Google Chrome Source, which is also based on webkit.
In fact, webkit is licensed under BSD + GPL, so IANAL, but I think this mesans FF can even *use* webkit's code directly in their browser ...
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
Apple loves to put in meaningless benchmarks with no real-world meaning to hype their products.
For example, the "3 times faster than a Pentium II" claims back in some of the older PowerPC days - this was true for a single Photoshop operation that at that point had Altivec optimizations on PPC but was running straight scalar code (no MMX) on a P2.
For nearly all other applications, the P2 was equal to or faster than the PPC. But Apple hyped their systems based on that one single meaningless-for-most-people benchmark. (As opposed to AMD's speed rating system which for the Athlon XPs was based on a suite of benchmarks and their average comparison to a similarly clocked P4, which was typically pretty accurate.)
Here, how is Apple magically eliminating network latency and providing infinite network bandwidth with browser changes? For nearly all users, the network is the bottleneck.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I've tried pointing that out before, but you're probably wasting your breath. The tin-foil hat crowd here at slashdot seems to think that Apple is keeping all the juiciest enhancements for themselves. I know it's not true because I run Safari on my macs and have run some webkit browsers like midori on my linux machines, they're about as fast, certainly faster than firefox. I'd use midori as my full time browser, but it's not as full featured as firefox and is unstable (or was last version I downloaded, like 0.0.21 or so).
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Short Answer: Yes
I was on the WHATWG mailing list when this was discussed. Apple was very clear that anything supported by Quicktime would be supported in the browser. They singled out OGG/Theora support as a format they will support, but only through user-installed plugins.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
They've been over this again and again (and I'm too lazy to do the Googling for you). The browser comprises two parts, WebKit, the rendering engine, and Safari, the front-end. Much like Mozilla and Firefox.
They replace the system-wide WebKit FOR DEVELOPMENT PURPOSES, so it can be tested with iTunes, Mail, and Dashboard (and other apps that use WebKit). The old Safari is not compatible with new WebKit, but both the old Safari and WebKit are preserved, so you can revert the change.
If you want to develop for the new WebKit, download WebKit which does nastiness to allow you to use the old Safari and the new WebKit.
I am interested in trying this beta, but it caused a problem with Apple Mail. I used the Uninstall package that came with the image and removed it. End of problem. I reported the problem and I am looking forward to the stable release.
Link for Safari 3:
http://support.apple.com/downloads/#internet
Clearly labeled as "Looking for Safari 3? Download here" at bottom of the Safari 4 download page.
... Except of course LLVM isn't released under the LGPL license, but a BSD style license that doesn't require changes to be made public. However, my experience working on LLVM is that all the Apple developers check their changes directly into the main (open) LLVM repository anyway.
I don't know what the situation is with webkit, but I expect it's something similar.
I think you should read that as:
(Mac with an Intel processor) or (a Power PC G5, G4, or G3 processor and built-in FireWireî)
and not
(Mac with an Intel processor or a Power PC G5, G4, or G3 processor) and (built-in FireWireî)
The latest safari nightly (r41176) compiles and runs just fine on my stock Ubuntu Hardy box. The only pain I encountered was the libsoup 2.25 library dependency which I had to pull down and compile myself instead of using the older library supplied from the Hardy repository.
Not only is WebKit open-source, it also seems like Apple has gone to great length to ensure that this piece of software is portable to other operating systems. The key is to actually do the "wget, autogen.sh, make, make install" steps yourself. It's really not that hard.
i have a ~9 year old pismo powerbook (tiger, g3, firewire) which is at the very low end of the supported hardware. in my limited experience with safari 4, it seems to perform about as well as firefox 3 memory wise. also safari 4 gets 100 on the acid3 test.
by the by if anyone wants to contribute to the buy me a new laptop fund call 1-800-.....
lose != loose
gmail was down for a little while.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/24/1337245
lose != loose
Session restore? SafariStand works great, and brings a whole raft of other features as well, such as click-to-play Flash.
Ad-blocking? I use SafariBlock with Rick752's EasyList.
Both are free.
I can't comment on your issue with Safari's memory usage, as I haven't experienced the same problem.
As a developer working on WebKit, this is completely wrong and more than a little insulting.
The versions of WebKit included with Safari releases are built directly from the public tree. There is no secret version of WebKit that Apple fixes bugs in for Safari releases before eventually landing the changes in the WebKit tree. The WebKit tree is Apple's official WebKit tree, and is where all of Apple's development on WebKit for Mac OS X and Windows takes place.
For sake of reference http://trac.webkit.org/browser/releases/Apple/Safari%204%20Public%20Beta contains the exact source code of WebKit that was built and released as Safari 4 Public Beta earlier today. There are no secret changes in the version of WebKit that Apple shipped. The changes are all there in the open for the world to see.
Been available here for Safari for a long time.
Opera still supports all the way back to Windows 95, which may be your only choice for a browser that's still being actively maintained. Otherwise, there is Firefox 2 which was maintained all the way to December 2008 so it's still fairly up to date. IE6 is still supported on Windows 2000 but I think 98/ME are S.O.L. as far as that goes.