Are you a Mac user with Google Chrome envy? You really shouldn’t be, especially now that the latest builds of WebKit use a ridiculously fast Javascript engine called SquirrelFish Extreme. The new engine, conveniently shortened to SFE, is actually faster than Chrome Javascript engine, V8. (It’s actually faster than the version of V8 currently floating around SVN, which is faster than the version that’s found in Chrome.)
Faster, more efficient Javascript processing improves the performance of Javascript-heavy Web sites like Gmail. In fact, name me one site that doesn’t use a lot of Javascript these days. (Drudge is the only example I can think of.)
For the uninitiated, these nightly builds of WebKit represent the bleeding edge in WebKit development. WebKit is the name of the rendering engine found in Safari and Google Chrome. By downloading a nightly build, your local version of Safari launches using the latest version WebKit. It’s sort of like driving your car to work with a brand new engine every day. Builds are available for both Mac and Windows, but I figured Windows folks wouldn’t be as excited.
No, these nightly builds of WebKit don’t have that fancy multi-process architecture the Google Chrome has, but the improved Javascript performance is more than worth quick download.
She’s quite fast. Promise.
I’ve been using Webkit for several months now. I see as like one those cars that a tuning mob has made light by stripping of excess and tuned the engine. So it’s all speed and pretty much no features. That said all builds were noticeably faster than Firefox, Opera, regular Safari and the much hyped as being the fastest Omniweb. Averaging under 2000ms on the sunspider test, to put that into perspective, Omniweb averages under 8700ms.
when I upgraded to newer build (r36519) last week, I was amazed to find it score under 900ms. Making it almost twice as good as my previous version (<1600ms)