Apple Officially Releases Safari 4, Calls it "World's Fastest"
Apple, who knows a thing or two about marketing, released its Safari 4 web browser this week calling it the "world's fastest and most innovative web browser." Sound familiar? It should, because Apple made the same claim a little over four months ago when it released Safari 4 in beta form, only now the company has taken its self-praise a step further.
"The successful beta release helped us fine tune Safari 4 into an even better, faster version that customers are going to love," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Safari is enjoyed by 70 million users worldwide and with its blazing fast speed, innovative features, and support for modern web standards, it's the best browser on any platform."
Safari owes much of its speed to the new Nitro JavaScript rendering engine, which the company claims executes JavaScript almost eight times faster than IE8 and three times faster than Firefox 3. At the heart of Safari 4 is the WebKit browser engine with support for HTML 5, advanced CSS effects, stellar web compliance, and more.
But the "best browser on any platform"? Scores of Firefox users addicted to add-ons might have something to say about that.

Image Credit: Apple
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shomval
June 09, 2009 at 7:47pm
but doesn't the speed also depend on your computer? if so then those who have slow computers and run the sun spider thing will get lousy results?
does having alot of other programs at one time also slow it down? if so then the results cannot be trusted right?
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rseding91
June 09, 2009 at 7:28pm
Sure benchmarks may say one browser is faster than another. But how often do you go from website to website loading javascript programs?
really all anyone is going to do is load one website or one java program and sit on it for a ammount of time. So in the end one browser may be faster than another, but you wont see it unless you do benchmarks.
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perldev
June 09, 2009 at 7:20am
I ran sunspider (javascript) bentch mark:
FF: 3.0.10: 6029.6ms
IE8 InPrivate: 10149.2 ms
Chrome: 3.0.182.2: 1236.6ms
Safari 4.0 (530.17): 1355.8ms
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foamcup
June 09, 2009 at 7:11am
I mean, really, Opera loads pages quick. Chrome and IE are vying for second, with Firefox dragging up the rear with it's pokey rendering speed. I haven't used Safari extensively, so all I can say for sure is that it's faster than Firefox, since everything is, lol.
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Jeffredo
June 09, 2009 at 10:03am
Firefox 3.X is generally as fast (or faster) than Opera 9.64 in almost every catagory. I use and like both and I can't see a perceptible difference in rendering speed between the two (regardless how I tweak Opera's network settings or redraw times).














