Another day, another incremental release of jQuery. This one is sporting 13% faster CSS selectors and 103% faster event handlers.
Meanwhile, as the JavaScript libraries continue to evolve and improve, the browser engines are also focusing on speed improvements. Dave Hyatt and the WebKit gang have announced a brand new JavaScript engine called SquirrelFish. This looks like being about 60% faster than the previous WebKit interpreter so you can expect quite a speed boost in the next version of Safari.
If you’re interested in what happens under the hood with Squirrel Engine, Dave shares some of the philosophical underpinnings:
SquirrelFish owes a lot of its design to some of the latest research in the field of efficient virtual machines, including research done by Professor M. Anton Ertl, et al, Professor David Gregg, et al, and the developers of the Lua programming language.
You can find plenty of gory details on the Surfin’ Safari blog.
Posted by Jeremy on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 4:57pm
Comments
Good news for all Safari users… With a market share above 6% and the (probable) fastest JavaScript-Engine around, Safari can go for Firefox3 now ;)
Safari 3.1 is ahead of Firefox 2 in speed. Firefox 3.0 is slightly ahead of Safari 3.1. But the future is interesting!
Safari 4 (?) bytecode vz. Firefox 4 Tamarin with JIT compilation? Interesting battle. And I am sure Opera won’t sit around doing nothing. Nor will MS!
However, as long as Safari is plagued with security issues the browser is (hopefully) in no position to overtake Firefox in usage. Security must be more important than speed!
# Posted by Lars Gunther on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 8:31am
Thanks for adding that extra boost to jQuery. SquirrelFish looks very promising and I can not wait to see how it evolves overtime.
Safari can go for Firefox 3 now?
Patrick overall from my experience Safari is going to work better than Firefox anyway b/c its native Mac software. Maybe thats taking the post away from coding, but regardless speed is speed right?
# Posted by Logo Designers on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 1:02pm
Do they work on something else, besides speed improvements?
# Posted by TrueRoot on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 4:38am
I’ve just installed Firefox 3 and it’s great. I wonder what kind of problems I will eventually discover
I’m working on firefox 3.0 and I haven’t experienced any problems so far.
Competition between browsers should produce great improvements. However, I get the feeling that IE stuck somewhere at the back of beyond.
I am using both firefox 3 and safari 3 (pc and mac) and i thing safari is better for mac, but firefox has at least one big advantade, namely the plugins..
Sorry. Comments are closed.