Safari Leading the Pack in JavaScript Performance
There’s a performance arms race going on among the various JavaScript engines in your favorite web browsers. The latest to leap ahead is SquirrelFish Extreme, a new version of the JavaScript rendering engine that will ship with the next version of Apple’s Safari browser.
Developer Maciej Stachowiak reports on the Surfin’ Safari blog that the new SquirrelFish Extreme (or SFX for short) is over twice as fast as its predecessor, and uses more advanced rendering techniques — like fast native code generation — to “deliver even more JavaScript performance.”
While the Surfin’ Safari blog only compares SFX to earlier versions of SquirrelFish, blogger Cameron Zwarich has released some benchmarks of SFX against V8, the rendering in Google’s new Chrome browser, and TraceMonkey, which is slated to arrive in Firefox 3.1.
The results put SFX well ahead of the other two. SFX is 36 percent faster than V8, and 55 percent faster than TraceMonkey. The metrics, and graph above, are based off of SunSpider benchmarks in runs per minute.
Of course Google’s Chrome has the advantage of being the only one of the three that’s actually available now. SquirrelFish Extreme is expected to arrive in the next major version of Safari, though Apple hasn’t offered a timeline for when that will be released.
All three of the these new rendering engines are in their infancy and we expect the benchmarks will continue to leap frog over each other as development progresses, but one thing is for sure, your Ajax heavy web apps are going to be much faster in the near future.
In the mean time you’ll have to make do with what’s available today.
[Graphic courtesy of Surfin’ Safari]
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