Safari sets the pace
At its Worldwide Developer Conference earlier this month Apple not only previewed its new Snow Leopard operating system but also announced the release of Safari 4, the company’s latest browser. And with Firefox 3.5 due to be released later this month, the browser wars are ready to be re-ignited.
While Firefox, the open source cross-platform browser, was long touted as the speediest browser around, Safari 4 is shaping up to be the benchmark in the coming year. And speed is not its only claim, Safari also turns in a perfect score when it comes to web standards.
Apple can always be relied on to include as much eye-candy as possible in each of its new releases and Safari 4 is no exception. Safari’s Top Sites feature, uses the same concept used by Opera, Chrome and IE8 but adds a 3D effect to the lineup of popular sites. The 3D effect is nice but doesn’t add much value to the actual usefulness of the tool.
Similarly, in place of a standard history list of sites previously browsed, Safari 4 wraps the history in a Cover Flow presentation just like it does with media files on iPhones and iTunes. So instead of trawling through a list of websites visited, users can scroll through a rolodex-like presentation of sites. The same can be done with bookmarks. It’s a departure as far as browser interface design and makes it just a little easier to navigate long lists of websites.
Speed boost
The real change in Safari 4 that makes it worth a serious look is its new Nitro JavaScript engine. The Nitro engine has significantly improved Safari’s page rendering performance and, depending on the tests being run, Safari is comfortable at the top end of the speed chart. Apple claims Safari 4 is the fastest browser in history. In most comparative tests run Safari does indeed stand its ground against Google’s Chrome browser and out performs Firefox 3.5 betas and Internet Explorer.
The other area in which Safari sparkles is in web standards conformance. The most often-cited test for web standards conformance is the Acid3 test which puts browsers through their paces. Safari 4 manages a maximum 100/100 reading in the Acid3 test while Firefox 3.5 returns scores in the 90s. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 browser performs significantly worse than the other two in the Acid3 test, returning values in just the 20s.
Safari 4 also includes support for a number of HTML 5 features which open the way to significantly new online applications. Among these is support for offline storage which means that web applications will be able to store portions of their data locally to speed up their performance. The idea of offline storage for web applications is similar to what Google is trying to do with Gears.
Although Safari is hoping to lay claim to the title of being the fastest browser it does still have to contend with Google’s Chrome and Firefox, both of which are getting faster with each new release. Although Apple claims that Safari 4 is as much as eight times as fast as IE8 and four times faster than Firefox 3, the Firefox developers claim that the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.5 is more than three times faster than its own predecessor. Which, if true, could mean that Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 will be on a par when it comes to speed.
Just like Safari 4, Firefox 3.5 also includes a number of HTML 5 innovations. Among these are support for the new video tag for embedding multimedia, offline storage and CSS Web fonts. And with HTML 5 gradually finding its way into the more popular browsers, a new level of web development becomes possible.
While there will be a continual battle for dominance on the speed front, Safari, Firefox and Chrome are well paced to set the standards in the coming years as web applications become the norm.
Safari 4 versus IE & Firefox – give your views
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