Apple Safari to Become 10x Faster with SquirrelFish Extreme

Apple has marketed Safari as “the fastest browser in the world,” but “lab tests” vs “real world tests” can sometimes produce different results. We use multiple operating systems on a daily basis, so we play with different browsers quite a lot. Unfortunately, Apple’s browser has performed poorly on our machines. But, that’s about to change!

According to Apple developer Maciej Stachowiak, the next generation of JavaScript engine - SquirrelFish Extreme (or SFX for short) - promises more advanced  techniques and fast native code generation. How fast? How about superfast?

“SquirrelFish Extreme as of today is nearly twice as fast as the original SquirrelFish, and over 10 times the speed you saw in Safari 3.0, less than a year ago. We are pretty pleased with this improvement, but we believe there is more performance still to come,” - said Stachowiak. He explained that “SquirrelFish Extreme uses four different technologies to deliver much better performance than the original SquirrelFish: bytecode optimizations, polymorphic inline caching, a lightweight ‘context threaded’ JIT compiler, and a new regular expression engine that uses our JIT infrastructure.”

We tested nightly builds of WebKit r36712 for Mac OS X and WebKit r36712 for Windows and we were also pleased with the results. Wow, this thing is really fast. But don’t take our word for it - go and download it from here, test it, and browse the World with it!