macnn
06/20/2008, 7:40pm, EDT
Friday, June 20th
Safari bests Firefox, IE at JavaScript rendering
Webkit's earlier reported adoption of the SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter is paying off, as Safari takes the lead in browser rendering speeds. Zimbra writes that Apple's web browser led the pack ahead of Firefox and Internet Explorer, with the Yahoo-owned messaging company declaring Safari "Winner of the Browser Wars." The tests were performed using several incarnations of all browsers as they viewed Zibra's AJAX web-client, and recorded using OpenQA Selenium.
According to the tests, both Safari 3.1.1 and build r33940 sit ahead of recent builds of Firefox and Internet Explorer, with Zimbra saying that there is still plenty of room for Apple to experiment.
Filed under: software
Other story tags: Safari, browser, internet, Ajax, JavaScript
, 
, 10
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
Top
subscribe to comments
for this article
SquirrelFish....
At least present the facts clearly - even without SquirrelFish Safari 3.1.1 beats all contenders...
Not according to…
…the FireFox 3 marketing material. Go to the Mozilla site and look for the FF3 feature and comparison stuff. According to them, FF3 is the clear winner.
Faster?
I'll take unbiased independent test results over any company's marketing material any day of the week. I'm sure Microsoft also has similar marketing material that shows IE to be quicker than the rest as well.
More info please
It would be nice if you identified who this Zimbra is and why we should care.
Shouldn't the title of the article read Safari BEATS firefox???
"Safari Bests Firefox"
Shouldn't The title of the article read "Safari BEATS Firefox"?
re: Faster?
Guest: How do you know Zimbra is unbiased?
And what does Firefox have to gain by saying their browser is faster? They are releasing it for FREE. And it's been free for all platforms a lot longer than Safari.
Terrin: If you click on the "writes" link within the above article you will find out everything you need to know.
webraider: No, "bests" is fine for the title of this article. It means the same thing.
Well
That is because Safari was marketed to the Mac platform exclusively. We had a number of choices like Internet Explorer 5, Netscape 6, Omni Web, Opera, and Phoenix(Firefox). However, people wanted Apple to develop their own web browser and a stable version was released in 2003. Mozilla Firefox did not have an official release until 2004 whereas Apple delivered Safari 1.0 in the same calendar year.
So there was no need to release Safari onto Windows because it was all about building the digital life with Apple branded applications ruling over the Mac.
Safari IS the fastest
The funny thing is these results don't even take into account Safari 4. Anyone who's got their hands on the developer preview can tell you the app is significantly faster than Safari 3.1.1 and puts it well ahead of Firefox and Opera and aeons ahead of the pathetic IE.
Also, tests aren't biased. It's hard to fake the tests. However, in page rendering speeds the current Opera and the current Firefox do go a bit faster. However, Safari 4 again beast both by an very significant margin.
In the end, however, it's not that big a deal. We're talking about such small differences that normal users aren't really going to notice anything. Us web-warriors will but not many others.
Personally I think the title should be, "IE still the worst browser by pathetic margin."
FF
Chirpy22 - Firefox may be free, but in makes money for Mozilla (millions of dollars from the search box - which Safari also has).
Of course, most of the time I find network speed far slower than my browser.