WebKit Gives Konqueror a Speed Boost (Past Firefox)

An anonymous reader writes "We always knew that WebKit is going to make Konqueror fast; but how much faster? Today we test that by putting Konqueror with KHTML through the SunSpider JavaScript Test and the then do the same with WebKit. To get an idea of how fast they are compared to other browsers, we also decided to put Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 through the tests."

Comments

Re:What the frak is Konqueror?

[jonbryce]

It is the default browser in KDE, unless your distro changed it to Firefox. If you use Gnome, or OSX or Windows, you probably won't get to see it.

Re:How important are JavaScript times?

[bjourne]

I know nothing about cars so I can't give you a car analogy, sorry. However, javascript performance isn't very important at all unless "the page" really is a full javascript application ala gmail. The reason for that is that you delay the javascript execution until after the whole page has rendered by hooking up your code with the body onload event. This avoid the page lockups you can encounter on badly coded pages where the browser can't render the page before the javascript has been run to completion.

Of course, the above is only true if all the javascript on the page follows best practices. That is seldom true if the page includes javascript from ad networks which has the bad habit of running document.write calls during the loading of the page. Since document.write can modify anything on the page, when such a function call is executed, the browser has to stop everything else until the javascript is run and then continue rendering. In that scenario, faster javascript execution would definitely lead to much faster page loads.

Re:So the real question is

[icebike]

The speed changes in webkit are being backported to KHTML.

As to why, its always good to have choices and an alternate source in case someone pulls a Larry Ellison on you.

So you get fast JavaScript, but NO JAVA

[xiando]

It must be noted that the WebKit support in Konqueror is very limited in many ways, and this may matter more to many people than a JavaScript speedboost. It does NOT, for example, allow you to run Java applets. http://websvn.kde.org/*checkout*/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kdewebkit/ISSUES

My personal opinion is that all other written-for-WebKit browsers are better choices compared to Konqueror+kpart for those who want a browser with WebKit rendering at this point.

Re:What the frak is Konqueror?

[TheRaven64]

Everybody is all friendly again, but some have long memories

And some have very faulty memories:

Kong (KHTML) was ripped off by Apple,

KHTML was forked by Apple.

and they began the work on webkit as a closed source project

They worked on it internally, more-or-less secretly until the first version of Safari, when they released their code at the same time they shipped the binaries.

After some serious (legal) prodding,

After a number of KHTML developers bitched publicly.

Apple finally did the right thing and returned their changes to the community

Apple moved development into public svn rather than providing large (and difficult to merge) patch drops with each release. They also began soliciting external contributions from companies like Nokia, Adobe, and so on, as well as from the wider community.