“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!
Too bad MDN pages still load in “Turtle Mode”.
I haven’t noticed a difference between the two the regular safari is actually faster with PithHelmet on.. However it could be that my FiOS is too fast.
“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?”
when the G3 cpu came out everyone said it was fast. but i am not trading my C2D for one…..
I started running WebKit over the weekend. Yep, it’s pretty damn fast. I haven’t timed it, but it sure feels a lot faster. It even loaded Concierge with no prodding.
It’s funny how S L O W L Y MDN loads. It must be the clutter of ads.
Steve516… Yes. It must optimizing time at Apple. It usually takes a few updates before they smooth out a new OS release. Tiger took until 10.4.4, I seem to remember.
Let’s hope that 10.5.2 takes some of the ‘edge’ away from Leopard.
You know this is good! It proves something that we need to realize in the real world. Our potential needs to be our own passion and not someone else’s. Sometimes you need to let a dog (Microsoft), be a dog. When we cease to worry about what the other guy is doing and let that happen, innovation steps up to the plate. Maybe that is the something that Gates and Balmer haven’t figured out yet. Who cares about what they’re doing anyway?
Go Apple!
I would love for Safari to be as fast as Firefox. Firefox is significantly faster (to the naked eye) than Safari is on my two PowerPC-based Macs as well as my friend’s new MacBook Pro.
HOWEVER, Firefox 3 looks like a real winner! When the 3rd beta comes out (this week or next), I am getting it.
Let the browser wars begin a new chapter – Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3.1
Uhhhh, link to the article???
All they need to sort out now is Safari crashing! It can get annoying sometimes.
So…Is there a “3G iPhone” drinking game we can all play?
Everytime you hear a pundit predict a 3G iPhone, take a drink.
Everytime you hear a pundit say the iPhone is slow, make them take a drink.
Everytime someone predicts slow iPhone sales until the 3G verison is produced, break a bottle over their head.