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

I Guess ...

[WrongSizeGlass]

I Guess they finally Konquered that speed barrier they were dealing with. If you look at their old speed numbers you'll see that they used to perform like an old lady crossing the street. Now it's more like the car racing away after running over the old lady.

Re:I Guess ...

[sznupi]

"...like an old lady krossing the street. Now it's more like the kar racing away after running over the old lady.
--
"If I'd asKed my kustomers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." ~ Henry Ford"

^fixed...

How important are JavaScript times?

[mickwd]

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?

Re:How important are JavaScript times?

[arose]

How important are JavaScript times to the overall speed of rendering pages?

That is the wrong question. How important is Javascript speed for advanced web applications and HTML5 games?

Re:How important are JavaScript times?

[phantomfive]

It's looking towards the future. HTML 5 is designed to replace Flash, but it can't do it if Javascript is slow. Performance is going to be an important differentiator in browsers, for how well they are able to run web apps (of course, if all browsers speed javascript up to roughly the same performance level, it won't be a differentiator).

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:How important are JavaScript times?

[tepples]

How important is Javascript speed for advanced web applications and HTML5 games?

Cue the inevitable weenies who protest that the web is intended for documents, not applications, and applications should be written in native code, not JavaScript. In fact, queue them too because there seem to be so many of them.

Re:How important are JavaScript times?

[Anonymous Cowpat]

I know nothing about cars so I can't give you a car analogy, sorry.

You must be new here...

Re:How important are JavaScript times?

[dingen]

Since the majority of business is still being handled by COBOL, you really haven't got anything to worry about yet.

Re:How important are JavaScript times?

[tepples]

Javascript performance is largely irrelevant when rendering Wikipedia or Google.

MediaWiki sites such as Wikipedia don't use a lot of JavaScript, but Google does. Google Search's live suggestion was one of the first applications of the paradigm now called AJAX, and Gmail is an outright web app.

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.

So the real question is

[dlenmn]

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.

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.

Re:What the frak is Konqueror?

[sznupi]

It's what spawned Webkit; which in turn is the most mature modern browser engine available on current Amigas, you know...

Re:Not a useful comparison (yet)

[amicusNYCL]

JaegerMonkey is making steady progress in improving performance and in a couple of months or so will likely be on par with Nitro and V8.

You mean, in several months Mozilla will be approaching the level that Google is at now. It's become pretty clear that Google is able to develop Chrome much faster than Mozilla is able to develop Firefox.

Also, Opera is faster than Mozilla as well, I'd like to see it included on that chart to compare with the others. Maybe even IE9, if it doesn't skew the Y-scale too much.

Re:So yesterday.

[supersloshy]

Firefox 4 Beta 2 is so yesterday, today Firefox 4 Beta 3 is all the rage.

True: 4b2 is outdated. 4b3 is much more recent. And who modded him as funny? This is informative.

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:So you get fast JavaScript, but NO JAVA

[CRCulver]

It does NOT, for example, allow you to run Java applets.

Oh noes! Does it at least support the Gopher protocol and the <blink> tag?

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.