Safari has been released for windows today. Surprising in itself, but what comes as more of a shock, is its speed.
Safari has existed for over 4 years. It has enjoyed a small, increasing, market share nearing 5% of all browsers, and up until now, has been available only for the Mac.
So when Steve Jobs announced Safari was fast, faster than any windows-based browser, you can’t help but wonder if he’s being a little biased. Surely a browser that hasn’t seen the light of windows, would not be any match for ones that have been developed on the platform for years? We thought it was time to test - specifically the JavaScript.
For the test we’re using Quirksmode’s JavaScript benchmark. It creates a 50×50 table in html whose cells are filled with a single character. The PC specification used for this test is an Athlon 2500XP+ with 2 Gigabytes of RAM. To ensure a level of accuracy, results are repeated numerous times to discount anomalies. The final samples reflect the most consistent of these; (lower is better)
| Browser | W3C DOM 1 | W3C DOM 2 | Table methods | innerHTML 1 | innerHTML 2 | Total time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Internet Explorer 7 | 2,136ms | 1,922ms | 8,271ms | 161ms | 78ms | 12,568ms |
| Firefox 2.0.0.4 | 344ms | 271ms | 281ms | 83ms | 99ms | 1,078ms |
| Opera 9.21 | 167ms | 130ms | 187ms | 26ms | 26ms | 536ms |
| Safari 3 beta (B 522.11.3) | 88ms | 78ms | 83ms | 37ms | 37ms | 323ms |
With a total time of 322ms, over 12 seconds faster than internet explorer, Safari is clearly the winner. Would similar results be found in HTML? Or even AJAX/XMLhttpRequests? We don’t know and we’re sure they’ll be plenty of bugs to iron out yet.
However, Apple have provided another powerful browser for windows, aggressively etching themselves further in to the core of the operating system. Microsoft have got themselves some major competition.
You can check out Safari here; http://www.apple.com/safari/
June 12th, 2007 at 20:15
[…] it is. Here is the result of another benchmark test carried out by an independent organization : Four Shapes ? Safari… The fastest windows based browser? . The story doesn’t stop there : Opera Watch - Is Apple trying to fool the world? . Apple’s […]