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."
How important are JavaScript times to the overall speed of rendering pages?
Is it like comparing 0-60 times for cars (a decent indication of performance, though not the best)? Or is a bit like measuring the time from 0-10 in first gear - a rather insiginificant proportion of the whole time taken to render a cross-section of typical web pages?
Do sites just concentrate of JavaScript performance so much because it's easier to measure?
Is work continuing on KHTML, and -- if so -- why? I mean, KHTML surely has some stuff going for it (it was the basis for WebKit), but it seems like there's a really clear winner.
Sunspider Test
Firefox-3.5.9-Linux: 2331.6ms
Opera-10.61-Linux: 868.2ms
Chromium-6.0.492.0-Linux: 865.6ms
I would have posted links to the results but apparently there were too many non-letter characters per line (even with the links inside href attribs).