Safari vs. WebKit icons.
Posted on 02/10/2008 1:23:24 PM PST by Swordmaker
When Apple chose the KHTML engine for its Safari Browser in 2003 over the more popular Gecko engine that powers Firefox, a lot of people were surprised. Firefox was way more popular than the Konquerer browser and had a lot more open source developers online.
Since then, Apple has really run with the KHTML engine, forking it off, renaming its development version "WebKit" and making it faster and leaner than Firefox on the Mac and both Firefox and Internet Explorer on the PC. While it doesn't have a lot of the functionality of Firefox plug-ins and the ActiveX controls of IE, more and more support has been built around the Webkit engine as it gains in popularity. (Yes, Opera is very nice as well - especially the torrent downloading.)
The latest builds of WebKit are adding a great number of improvements that go beyond the "Catching up" that it has been doing in the past. These improvements can be broken down into two major areas: features and speed. The features are certainly interesting and you can read about many of them here. I want to focus specifically on speed.
There is no other way to say it. Holy cow is this thing fast! I am currently testing Webkit build r30090 (more recent versions are now there) against standard Leopard Safari 3.04. This unoptimized WebKit build version is running circles around the standard Safari browser. It isn't even close. I am on a Rev 2, 2 GHz MacBook Pro with 2 GB of RAM on 100 Mb/s Fiber. I am running the two browsers next to each other on a 30 inch display. Webkit feels like I am on a maxed out Mac Pro tower - it really does. Try it if you don't believe me.
If you do, you'll notice that the transition is a cake walk. All of your bookmarks, history, cookies, etc. move across each browser – even when opened at the same time so it is very easy and low risk to test WebKit. It has also been so remarkably stable in my testing that I am tempted to move Safari off of my dock.
During random browsing, I noticed that Safari is loading pages about half as fast on average as WebKit. On heavy pages the load times are definitely discernible. On light pages, it is harder to tell the difference. But how to quantify? Webkit.org has some Javascript test pages. Sunspider is about a three minute test that focuses on JavaScript benchmarking. My confidence was so high in WebKit that I started off Safari on the test before I opened Webkit. About 20 seconds after I started Safari, I started Webkit. Webkit was way faster across all of the tests. I also opened my CPU monitor and noticed that Webkit was using a percentage point or two more CPU than Safari - but nothing drastic. Webkit was done about a minute before Safari was complete.
The results in completing the test:
Safari: 11932.0ms +/- 0.9%
Webkit: 4484.0ms +/- 1.8%
The newest Webkit is 2.5 times faster.
Another test called Slickspeed, tests other aspects of the browser's rendering engine. Again, WebKit simply blows Safari out of the water in almost every test.
What's so interesting about this is that Safari is already a fast browser. The fastest if you believe Steve Jobs 2007 WWDC Keynote. WebKit's amazing, unoptimized speed means that Safari is going to get so much faster, to where it makes a significant difference in browser user experience. While Microsoft's products are getting bulkier and slower, Apple's products are getting leaner and faster.
WebKit feeds into a lot of other technologies. It is also the basis of the Symbian phone browsers and the technology behind Adobe's AIR. Safari is also the browser for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and these WebKit improvements will likely hit these devices as well. Probably about the time a 3G iPhone is released.
Now that will be one slick little browser to have in your pocket!
The fault lies not with Safari but with Microsoft. MS web tools make deliberately non-standards compliant websites that do not play well with others. Safari is fully standards compliant.
I've had only two crashes of Safari on my MacBook Pro in the past year and one month... and I can find nothing that relates one to the other... so I can't help. How much RAM are you running? That might be an issue.
It isn't ...
It's Official: Safari Is the Fastest Browser on Windows! - New test supporting Apple's productBy: Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor
Back in June, the Cupertino-based company Apple rolled out the first beta version of Safari for Windows, it's well known Mac OS X browser which was made available for Microsoft's operating system. Apple claims Safari is the fastest browser on the web and even placed a chart on its official page to support this statement. In addition, you can always read the 12 reasons you'll love Safari with blazing performance and elegant user interface on the first two positions. So, Apple sustains Safari for Windows is the fastest browser on the web.
That's why Michael Czeiszperger from Web Performance Inc. decided to conduct several tests which were supposed to reveal if Safari is really the fastest browse on the Internet.
"Other tests have run Safari 3.0 Windows beta through benchmarks and shown how it performs with canned tests, but we are more interested in seeing how the browsers perform when people are actually using them. This meant measuring how Safari performed when actually browsing web sites, which creates several test design challenges when compared to an actual repeatable benchmark," he wrote on the official Web Performance websites.
In order to test the browser, he selected the first 16 Alexa websites and tried the application through different techniques. "The web sites listed above were hosted on a local IIS web server, and both initial and cached measurements taken. It quickly became apparently that one browser was not the fastest overall. One browser would be fastest on one web site, while another might be the fastest on another."
The results? Safari is really the fastest browser on the Internet while Firefox and Internet Explorer come on the next places. "The performance gains on the average remotely hosted web page varied from .2 seconds when from cache and up to 1.4 seconds when loading a web page for the first time. The .2 second difference between Safari beta and Firefox 2, and Safari beta and IE7 is negligible, and shows that for web sites that are accessed frequently, and thus likely to be in a browser's cache, we found no appreciable difference in performance," the expert noted.
“The fault lies not with Safari but with Microsoft. MS web tools make deliberately non-standards compliant websites that do not play well with others. Safari is fully standards compliant.”
These same sites work with Firefox perfectly. The “it’s MS’s fault” thing can’t be an excuse anymore, Sword. Microsoft is a dominant presence, and they’re going to influence web design. And that hasn’t hindered the Mozilla foundation, which has far fewer resources than Apple.
I would think that most people the speed difference would be out weighed by if they like how it works for them. I have played with Foxfire Opera and IE7. I use foxfire the most because of the tabs setup. I’ll down load Safari but speed will not be the biggest issue for me.
I haven’t had many problems with Safari...
I have Firefox downloaded on my Mac, but don’t like it that much.
Probably not Firefox’s fault, since I do not have the time and patience to do all the fussing it calls for to get it all set up properly, to make it as easy as Safari.
I understand that others might have different expectations.
The few times I have experienced a “failure”, I tend to blame the website, and always send the info to Apple.
Apple is about meeting international standards... Microsoft refuses and insists on incorporating proprietary code. Mozilla is willing to kowtow to MSs intransigence but Apple and those who set the standards are not. Mozilla reverse engineers the code MS refuses to license and that just allows MS to continue but even Firefox does not work correctly with all MS built sites. Everything that MSs code will do can be accomplished with the standard code available in HTML without using the proprietary of work-around code. The real solution is to change the non-standards compliant websites. More and more of them are doing so.
I haven't had it crash on my G5 in over a year... and have had only two crashes on my Macbook Pro in 13 months. I usually have between five and six windows, each with up to ten tabs... and it is still rock solid.
I have had my iPhone Safari crash maybe three times, all before 1.1.3 was released. Usually there are three to five windows open on my iPhone. I think that is reliable.
Perhaps you need to re-install your Safari on your computer... and reset your iPhone to standard as well.
I’m running 2 gigs.
Should be enough.
Maybe you need to visit the Apple store . . .
Have you tried this beta (as I take it to be) yourself?
Now why would you go and post that picture? Some browser has to be faster than others, why not Safari/WebKit? I use Firefox most of the time since I run Linux and Safari/WebKit isn’t yet available for that platform (though Konqueror, of course, is); in Windows I use IE when I must and Safari the rest of the time. Of those, Safari is considerably the fastest, and it’s quite a beautiful piece of software to look at, and stable.
Posts like yours seem motivated by knee-jerk anti-Apple-ism. Tsk.
Nope. Just read about it here. My days of downloading every Beta of software is long gone... I need reliability and don't have the time to be seeking out glitches. Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt, wore holes in it.
My days of downloading every Beta of software is long gone... I need reliability and don't have the time to be seeking out glitches. Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt, wore holes in it.
I'm conflicted. I can afford to live with some browser bugs, as long as my photos are safe I would tolerate a few crashes.OTOH my new Mac still seems fast to me, so I don't really need more speed (in contrast to my attitude toward the speed of Internet Explorer which came with my old Mac before upgrading to Panther. I had cable, and it felt like dialup).
“forking it off”
Hey, this is a family forum!!! ;’)
I used to use Camino when OS Xing it, and that’s related I think. Opera, though, is mentioned, always kinda hated that one, on any platform.
StumbleUpon is fun, and has led me to interesting sites 90 per cent of the time. :’)
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
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