14 DAY TRIAL // Apple released the fourth major installment of Safari yesterday. The beta release promises a totally new experience, as well as the fastest yet, which it provides, benchmark results have revealed.
The software-focused folks at Cnet UK grabbed Apple's Safari 4 Beta and decided to benchmark it using “both a PC running Windows XP SP2, and a Mac running OS X 10.6 with all updates applied.” However, we're pretty sure Cnet's editors meant to say Mac OS X 10.5.6, since a benchmark using the current developer build of Snow Leopard wouldn't be relevant to Mac users.
Using the SunSpider suite of JavaScript tests to determine which browser was the quickest, testers showed that Safari 4 beat every existing browser in terms of speed on commonly used operating systems and platforms.
The team of testers shockingly revealed that on a Windows PC, Safari was “a whopping 42 times faster than Internet Explorer 7, just over six times faster than Internet Explorer 8, 3.5 times faster than Firefox 3, and 1.2 times faster than Google Chrome.” Full benchmark results available below the graphs.
Safari 4 Benchmark graphs
Credits:
Cnet UKSafari 4 Beta on a PC with a 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo: 1) Safari 4 (Total time: 910ms) 2) Mozilla Minefield 3.2a1 (1,136ms) 3) Google Chrome (1,177ms) 4) Firefox 3 (3,250ms) 5) Opera 9.6 (4,076ms) 6) Internet Explorer 8 (5,839ms) 7) Internet Explorer 7 (39,026ms)
Safari 4 Beta on Mac OS X (2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo): 1) Safari 4 (Total time 967ms) 2) Minefield 3.2a1 (969ms) 3) Firefox 3 (3803ms) 4) Opera 9.6 (7322ms).
Safari 4 is touted by Apple as “the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac and Windows PCs.” The fresh version of the Mac specific web browser introduces the new Nitro engine, which allegedly runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3.