“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,” Seth Weintraub reports for Computerworld. “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.”
“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,” Weintraub reports.
“The newest Webkit is 2.5 times faster,” Weintraub reports.
“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,” Weintraub reports. “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.”
i have been surfing in the webkit build for more than 24 hours now, and i think you are full of it….
…it is WAY more than 2.5 times. this thing screams!
Apple is building products the same way we humans are built on cell structure. Each individual cell is fast and productive, but with in that cell are hundreds, thousands or even millions of cells that are each fast, effecient and powerful. Their code is getting leaner and faster because they understand that to make their dna as effecient as possible they must make each sub-set of code just as important as the primary.
Truly, Apple is like water, fluid.
Thought I was the only one up at this hour getting ready for work.
The current version of Safari is buggy and unpredictable. Hopefully the speed gains will be coupled with stability.
Ouuuhhh, more SNAPPINESS?!
[ducking]
it’s almost 9am on the east coast, where people have already been at work for a few hours.. not everyone gets to roll into work at noon.
When it first came out wasn´t Apple and everyone saying how fast Safari was….and now they are implying that past/current speed sucks?
This will be especially good for macdailynews.com, which is a dog with all the ads. Even though I can’t see them because I have pithhelmet…
An upgrade that’s beyond snappier. Wowee. No doubt advertising levels will soon rise to meet the new browser’s capacity.
I would have been first post but Safari took forever to load. All this really means is even faster incompatibility with a lot of sites.
well, what if you are on the east coast and working from home today?
yawn… where is the coffee…
I found 3.0 to be faster than 2 for me… but I think it was more to do with leopard than safari itself. perhaps they have just finished optimizing safari for leopard now…
what seems amazing to me is how it “feels” like Apple has all its engineers working on one or two big projects at once, lots of attention placed on Safari now, Leopard before, iPhone before. Then, they get things working nice and SNAPPY and move on to the next item on the agenda. As opposed to other companies where they use a shotgun approach with everyone working on different projects trying to get them to work together somehow in the end… and you wind up with DLL errors. Like Microshit. Can I post that?
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macdailynews.com
BY FAR the slowest web site on the internet, period.
Soon it will be faster than my internet connection … then what??? I guess the only direction to go from here is precog prefetching … downloading what I want to see, before I know I want to see it….
Oh boy this is fantastic news! Think it’ll help the P-I-G S-L-O-W MDN pages? I really am all set on my “Love Compatibility”, thank you.
@fatal. I second that remark. By the time this gets posted it’ll be third or fourth, not second. Sloooooow!