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?

[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.