Safari vs. Chrome

I’ve been following the news and reviews of Google’s new web browser, Chrome.

Chrome is actually based on the same browsing engine that powers Safari, an open source project called WebKit. WebKit isn't a complete browser; it’s a rendering engine used by popular browser applications, including Safari, KHTML, and now Chrome.

Chrome looks to be an excellent browser, one I may very well use as my default browser in Windows once it exits beta testing. One thing I noticed right off was that Google has tweaked the JavaScript engine used in Chrome to produce incredibly speedy results from web sites that use JavaScript. Google wants fast JavaScript capabilities because it wants Chrome to be the browser for choice for individuals who use Google-based services, which use a lot of JavaScript.

Handling JavaScript-heavy web sites is one area where Safari could use a good tuneup. So I decided to test Safari against Chrome on Google's JavaScript test site. This site only tests how quickly a browser can run Google's JavaScript tests; it's not indicative of how fast a browser actually performs. Still, it was an interesting comparison. The JavaScript test site uses five tests to check various types of JavaScript performance.

Here are the results of my test of Safari 3.1.2 and Chrome, on a 2.4 GHz IMac.

• Overall score: 1592/3719
• Richards: 3272/3914
• DeltaBlue: 1880/3914
• Crypto: 2590/3144
• RayTrace: 2665/5789
• EarleyBoyer: 2469/6655
• RegExp: 857/972
• Splay: 289/5657

As you can see, Chrome, which is heavily optimized for JavaScript, left Safari in the dust, at least when it comes to running JavaScript. Most banking sites and many online services, such as web-based email and other web-based applications, use JavaScript.

All I can say is I hope Apple decides to give Safari a JavaScript tuneup in the near future.