“Proving itself a staggering 42 times faster at rendering JavaScript than IE 7, our benchmarks confirm Apple’s Safari 4 browser, released in beta today, is the fastest browser on the planet. In fact, it beat Google’s Chrome, Firefox 3, Opera 9.6 and even Mozilla’s developmental Minefield browser.” – CNET UK
Read the article: Safari 4 benchmarked: 42x faster than IE 7, 3.5x faster than Firefox 3
3 replies on “Safari 4 3.5x faster than Firefox 3”
Even the upcoming Firefox 3.1 has some promising performance improvements:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/02/mozilla-demos-impressive-firefox-31-features-at-scale.ars
The must-have plugins* for Firefox limit the use of any other browser as a backup browser, at best. If only these plugins could be used in any browser…
That said, Safari is a great browser.
* NoScript, Adblock Plus, Cookie safe, Flashblock, Firebug, ScribeFire etc.
I just tried it out and IT IS significantly fast 🙂
The article mentions that Safari 4 is faster than Mozilla Minefield which is the nightly build version that gets features into Firefox. So it means that S4 is probably faster than FF3.1 as well.
Having said that FF3.1 does have a cool feature in Worker threads which enable background threads to be executed within the browser. This feature was probably NOT taken into account while performing benchmark tests.