“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.
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)