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."

Comments

Notes on New Features

[AKAImBatman]

Nitro JavaScript Engine

Anyone know if this is a new engine or just Squirrelfish renamed?

Acid 3 Compliance

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.

CSS 3 Web Fonts

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.

CSS Canvas

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.

Re:Notes on New Features

[AKAImBatman]

I am a fanboi

Right you are! I am a HUGE fan of web standards and the new features that HTML5 is bringing. And because I have experience with browser developers like Apple, Opera, and Mozilla, I trust that they'll do a good job in making the features a reality. Especially since they're the same people writing the standards.

For those who actually care, I've managed to pull up some demos in Safari 4:

http://webkit.org/blog/138/css-animation/
http://webkit.org/blog/176/css-canvas-drawing/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssatten

I must say, I'm impressed! We'll see how well they work in real-world usage going forward.

The browser itself appears to be leaning more toward the UI design of Chrome. Which fits it well, IMHO. The new Coverflow feature is surprisingly slick and doesn't feel tacked on at all. The bonjour integration feels like a new management console for the network. I can surf all the devices and get important information on their location and status. I can even change the settings!

Which makes me wonder if the next version of OS X is going to use Safari-based widgets for network and printer management. Hmm...

At the very least, this is a nice way to surf the network on Windows. ;-)

Re:Notes on New Features

[AKAImBatman]

The whole point of features like Web Fonts is to get away from using images. Thus when you zoom, the renderings look crisp and clean. Try these demos in Safari 4 to see what I mean. Zooming the reference image looks ugly. (What you're complaining about.) Zooming the actual rendering is helpful and actually looks better the closer the examples are zoomed.

Re:No so bold

[wereHamster]

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.

Re:How does firefox maintain competitive advantage

[Tinlad]

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?

Re:How does firefox maintain competitive advantage

[je ne sais quoi]

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).

Re:From the horses mouth

[Halo1]

This is about a completely different iBench. If you look at the the benchmark graphs, you'll note that

• the displayed results are actually for Windows (click on the Mac link at the top to see the Mac results)
• at the bottom: HTML and JavaScript benchmarks based on VeriTestâ(TM)s iBench Version 5.0 using default settings and the SunSpider Performance test.

Re:How does firefox maintain competitive advantage

[bdash]

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.