“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.”
Is it faster code, or is it just off loading more code to the graphics card?
so, all you folks with the new build…. where can the rest of us non-connected slobs get it?
@ Jim – TIV
you can get it at webkit.org
If you are interested, look at the blog and you will get an explanation of some recent enhancements they’ve made and why it is so much faster than any other browser.
Wow. I really wasn’t expecting the sort of improvement from the new Webkit. It’s significantly faster. Can’t wait to see 3.1 on my iPod Touch!
i am curious about those who complain about crashing. i haven’t had a safari crash in over a year. what are you guys doing in your browsers?!?
Safari 3 is plenty fast on my Aluminum 24″ iMac (with the exception of MDN page loads).
RAM requirements represents my biggest complaint with Safari on Leopard, especially as I add tabs. For example, when I first open Safari, RAM usage is about 100 MB. At the moment with 8 tabs its almost 900 MB. Hopefully, someone at WebKit and Apple finally figured out how to reign in the RAM requirements on this hog.
“Probably about the time a 3G iPhone is released.”
How in the world does someone make this prediction when he’s testing a Safari beta and has no evidence when a 3G iPhone will be released? These analysts amaze me.
First Post!
That is, if my post at 8:45AM makes it before noon.
Can someone please explain to me the history of the “Snappy” thing? I am a relatively new switcher (in the last couple of years) and I am not sure where this whole “Snappy” thing came from.
Will speed bump also include the Windows version of Safari?
I’ll second that shen, what the hell are they doing to make Safari crash?!?
There msu be software loaded that is not good or it’s installations of OSX that have gone wrong and need to be fixed. Safari doesn’t (need to) crash – ever.
@Logan and others confused about the snappy thing.
Snappy has a life of its own when it comes to any kind of software update from Apple.
Whatever the update, people happily report back that the update has made their Mac ‘snappier’..!
All helps put a smile on faces in a world full of bad news.
Why is the latest build downloading at 5kB/s??
Must be because I don’t have the latest build…
Safari 3 keeps crashing when I quit it. Maybe they should fix this first.
Safari crashes because they have third party hacks installed-pithhelmet, saft, etc.- because Safari doesn’t have the basic functions a browser should have. Things like real ad blcoking(not just pop-ups), real choice in cookie handling(not all or nothing) and the ability to customize the interface.
So they go out and spend money to acquire third party hacks-then Safari crashes. Instead of blaming the hack, they blame Safari.
I just use Firefox and I get all the nifty add ons and basic functionality that Safari should have to begin with without paying a penny.
I ♥ WebKit. (If that doesn’t come thru, its a *heart*)
As mentioned before, check out webkit.org for the other awesomeness besides speed that’s in the pipeline, like HTML 5 in-browser SQL data storage, downloadable fonts, and other WC3 standards that MicroCrap never bothers to support.
I am running the webkit version – wow..=*^)
C
This is troubling…vaporware is usually much faster and much more bug free than reported.
Just my $0.02
I don’t have third party hacks, and my Safari crashes every so often. Normally 3-5 times a week.
I haven’t done anything to damage it. I got it when I installed Leopard.
Let’s face it. No software is 100% perfect, even Apple’s.
shen ,
my reaction as well. Safari never crashes on my iMac.
OK, let’s just hope I can use Safari for something like posting to this page. Right now, I have a huge number of websites that don’t work with Safari, but do with Firefox and Opera. Like this one. And apple.com.
Apparently, the brilliant programmers at Apple made a change to Safari that makes it incompatible with certain domain name servers. Meh.
Hooray….I’ll believe it when I see it.
This thing is smokin’ fast!
Even MDN loads faster!
(admittedly with safari AdBlock)