Well competition always helps, but I would like to see things shake out in such a way that there are really only 3-4 browsers to test on. 3 browsers, 3 platforms to test on (sorta, FF on all 3, Safari on 2, Chrome on 3 eventually, etc), its a lot of VMs...
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
SquirrelFish Extreme Accelerates JavaScript Even More
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Well competition always helps, but I would like to see things shake out in such a way that there are really only 3-4 browsers to test on. 3 browsers, 3 platforms to test on (sorta, FF on all 3, Safari on 2, Chrome on 3 eventually, etc), its a lot of VMs...
Faster Java Script is great, but could that at least make it handle Flash quicker on Windows Safari. Flash always crashes/slowes down Safari.
You're asking them to make the water buffalo run as fast as a gazelle...not gonna happen.
And Safari is definitely snappier. It went thru acid 3 test like it's butter.
I generally use Webkit nightly builds everyday and very rarely experience a crash so yes it is stable enough to use as a browser.
As xUKHCx said, the nightly builds are generally stable enough to use as a browser. I've used nightly builds of Webkit as my main browser for months and it has been at least as stable as Leopard's Safari.
On OS X you can run the nightly build while still keeping the normal Safari, not sure about Windows.
This is good news. I wish they'd put Safari 4 out a little faster though.. To me, it's something that should have come with 10.5.5.. but what can you do I guess.
And what's with people rating this negatively? What is negative about performance enhancements? I don't get it. Like, there could be a story on here "Steve Jobs to give every Apple customer that has ever existed a $1000.00 iTunes gift card as a huge thank you for their recent success" .. the rating would be something like, 1005 positive, 13 negative... I don't get why people click negative sometimes lol.
And what's with people rating this negatively? What is negative about performance enhancements? I don't get it. Like, there could be a story on here "Steve Jobs to give every Apple customer that has ever existed a $1000.00 iTunes gift card as a huge thank you for their recent success" .. the rating would be something like, 1005 positive, 13 negative... I don't get why people click negative sometimes lol.
Great! Now if only Apple could make a browser that doesn't crash 10 times a day (20 times a day on the iPhone).
This seems to vary considerably person by person.
I use Safari/Webkit on Leopard for hours every day at home, and rarely if ever have a crash. More often with Webkit than actual Safari...
I use Safari on Vista all day long at work, and it never crashes on me either...
Now Safari on the iPhone DOES crash once in a while...
Maybe I am just lucky?
What the heck do you do with Safari to make it crash 10 times a day? I use Webkit, (which should be less stable than the released version of Safari) and it hasn't even crashed on me once. Same goes with the actual released version of Safari 3. The Safari on my iPhone 3G has never crashed either. I use all three (WebKit primarily) for quite heavy tasks as well, not just the simple loading up of HTML pages.
I have no idea what you're doing to make it crash that often, but thats seriously never happened to me.
The browser that does crash like 20 times on me however...is Shiira. Excellent potential, sad direction. What can I say. :S.
Yay!
Faster JavaScript is awesome.
JavaScript is a really cool technology. This is the main engine under web applications. By making it this fast, it will basically be possible to implement almost any standard desktop applications within the web browser without using any Flash or Java or other external, plug-in based technologies.
I'm really hoping for even more HTML5 features to come soon. Those features will kill the need for Flash and Java in most applications very soon. Finally we will have a much more consistent and cross-platform application programing environment than today.
At the moment the most sophisticated mainstream web applications are coming from Google (Maps, Docs, Mail, etc) and Apple (Mobile Me). In the future these applications (and the hundreds of others to come) will have the same feature set and speed as the native desktop applications.
Faster JavaScript is awesome.
JavaScript is a really cool technology. This is the main engine under web applications. By making it this fast, it will basically be possible to implement almost any standard desktop applications within the web browser without using any Flash or Java or other external, plug-in based technologies.
I'm really hoping for even more HTML5 features to come soon. Those features will kill the need for Flash and Java in most applications very soon. Finally we will have a much more consistent and cross-platform application programing environment than today.
At the moment the most sophisticated mainstream web applications are coming from Google (Maps, Docs, Mail, etc) and Apple (Mobile Me). In the future these applications (and the hundreds of others to come) will have the same feature set and speed as the native desktop applications.
Brrrr, you make me shiver. How can you even talk about "application" programming environment? It's JavaScript, its a Scripting-Language! Any use of it to create something like an application is an abuse. And "consistent" is anything else than what I expect from a script overriding every preference on my computer on how to use the human interface.
Well, there speaks the ingenieur, but I know, the whole world jumps on board... Its a hype, we'll see how this all ends.
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)
I guess Safari really will get faster once this makes it into the update.
I guess Safari really will get faster once this makes it into the update.
ok, so i just dl'd the latest webkit sep. 19, and it is way snappier than firefox. dont know if it includes squirrelfish extreme or not, but it is definitely faster than safari of firefox.
my question is how long until we see this on the iphone or as a release into safari?
my question is how long until we see this on the iphone or as a release into safari?
Apple should just buy "SquirrelFish Extreme" like they bought NeXT and OPENSTEP, iTunes, Final Cut Pro, and CUPS.
If they own "SquirrelFish Extreme" they can build an even better Safari to beat Mozilla and Microsoft in the browser market and have 90% market share instead of 50%.
If they own "SquirrelFish Extreme" they can build an even better Safari to beat Mozilla and Microsoft in the browser market and have 90% market share instead of 50%.
This is basically Apple's product... it is part of the WebKit project and a majority of those folks are Apple employees.
SFX is already in WebKit nightly builds which are basically Safari with an upgraded WebKit and expect it soon in Safari 4.0.
Well, you are wrong. It would indeed be possible to implement office applications like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. in the browser window using
only JavaScript/AJAX, CSS, HTML DOM, without any plug-ins. They would look and work exactly like those, and with a fast enough JS engine they would be as fast as the native counterparts. We might need some more improvements in HTML5 and AJAX, but they are all coming soon.
In fact some web applications would even be faster than the native applications because by using AJAX the server side computational power adds up to the client's performance.
What would we gain with all this? Ultimate platform independence. Reduced client side hardware cost. Improved security.
I said "would" but in fact I should have written "will". Because this is the future for sure. Even MS is starting to get into the web application business.
Surprisingly, even gaming is not out of question in the future of web applications. I'm not talking about the latest 3D rendering engines per se, but most simpler games that don't have such high performance needs can be easily implemented once SVG or CANVAS 3D gets properly implemented in HTML5.
Let's rather say that JavaScript is an inadequate (and ill-named) technology that after enough efforts at fitting squares into circles managed to be used for something it was never intended for. Same with HTML.
Which means that most of the web of today is built on a huge mess of technologies that have been contorted out of their original use. AJAX is a prime example of this. It works, but it's messy. And it's also exceedingly difficult to find decent AJAX developers.
The problem is that Flash *is* meant for the modern web. ActionScript is what JavaScript should be if it was allowed to mature - still not a great language, but almost good enough for the job. Likewise, technologies like Flex, or even SilverLight, are well suited for the web as it is today.
By making JavaScript fast, we're just making the agony last longer... Some languages, like COBOL, should just let be left to rest. Javascript manages to be as messy as the worst script languages while at the same time managing to be as poor as the most limited compilated languages...
They will also be a lot more difficult to maintain, expand or even work on...
Well what are YOU doing when it crashes? I see a total of 3 Safari crash logs on my system in 2 years of use on this system. With an addition 4 crash logs related to the developer preview of Safari 4.0 (aka beta quality software, expected to have issues).What I'm doing to make it crash? Jesus Christ.
You do realize that ppc, at best, can expect to only have compatibility maintained going forward? I mean, no matter what, its still an order of magnitude slower than the machines being sold today, and as far as a time investment is a total dead-end.
That said, I expect them to also support some of these techniques on the ARM, based on memory/speed trade-offs.