macnn
02/09/2008, 2:30pm, EST
Saturday, February 9th
Safari to receive large speed boost in upcoming build
Apple's Safari web browser is about to get a large speed boost, if the current development version is giving an accurate depiction of what users can expect in the finished browser. Seth Weintraub, a writer for Computerworld's Apple blog, has been testing WebKit – Apple's developer version of the KHTML-based browser – and says that performance typically peaks at 2.5 times that of Safari, even in its currently unoptimized state.
Weintraub ran tests from Webkit.org, a site with many Javascript test pages, as well as doing a side-by-side comparison of overall download speeds. On the Sunspider test, he started Safari on the test, and about 20 seconds later, did the same for WebKit. Despite the early start in favour of Safari, WebKit was able to churn through the task and finish a minute earlier than the established browser.
The performance boost only comes at a cost of increased CPU usage, which Weintraub says is no more than one or two percent.
Filed under: Apple, software, networking
Other story tags: Safari, browser, performance, WebKit
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I'd rather see 3-5 (or 10) runs of each test, followed by an average with error bars.
That said, the daily builds are faster.
Is the rendering faster as well?
Um, if I'm web browsing, why doesn't it just use ALL of my processor speed available? Seems odd to leave power on the table.