Archive for the ‘Safari 4’ tag
Safari 4 vs Firefox 3.1
There are two things Firefox can do that Safari can’t:
1. Set pipelining on. Although there is risk that the web servers can’t support pipelining it provides a nice speedup on a high-speed connection.
2. Allow tweaking of the Connections per server setting. This is technically against the recommendations of the w3c protocol but when you have lots of bandwidth you can really get a nice performance boost pulling down the attached images.
I wonder when Safari will support these settings? I wonder when the max connections per server will be increased by default?
SquirrelFish Extreme for Mobile Safari?
So the biggest question in my mind now is:
When will we see SquirrelFish Extreme for the Mobile Safari browser on the iPhone?
Apple is already winning the mobile browser wars, and the latest WebKit advancements will only solidify that lead.
The Summer of 2008 Javascript Space Race
It has thus far been an amazing summer when it comes to browser performance.
We have seen 3 major advances in browser performance when it comes to Javascript specifically.
1. Firefox Tracemonkey
2. Google Chrome V8
3. Webkit SquirrelFish Extreme
Each one has been an exciting advancement in browser performance, leaping ahead quickly. I have been a long time Safari / Webkit nightly user on the Mac. I must admit that the release of tracemonkey moved me over to Firefox 3.1 for a few weeks. I longed for Google Chrome and V8 on my Macbook. But, I am happily back to Safari 4 / Webkit now that SquirrelFish Extreme has landed in the webkit nightly builds. It is blazingly fast, and Safari 4 is an excellent browser.
I am looking forward to further competition and code sharing in the open source space. Notice I didn’t say a thing about Internet Explorer 8. It is still lagging.
Firefox 3.1 + Tracemonkey = VERY FAST
If you haven’t yet downloaded a nightly version of Firefox 3.1 go and do it. Enable the Tracemonkey support by going to about:config and searching for “jit”. Set both of the jit options to “true” and away you go. The speed difference is incredible. It made the Safari 4 developer’s preview look like it was standing still.
