Craig Strong

With my recent launch of this blog I wanted my first official post to be something of substance.  After pondering for a while, I was handed a golden nugget with the recent release of Safari 4 Beta.  With Apple claiming that Safari 4 has 150 new features, I thought I would investigate further.  Was this going to be a compiled list of over stated achievements which so many before them have claimed to have solved?

I downloaded the Safari 4 Beta version on both Mac OSX and MS Vista to give them a run through.    Almost from the first moment I started using the browser I was impressed.  The clear and concise interface being unobtrusive, gave way to a well thought out structure which allows a user to get on with what’s most important, surfing the web.  It didn’t stop there though, after being gently seduced by Apple’s obvious attention to detail with their efforts combine style and functionality which include such features as the new ‘Top Sites’ 3D menu and the iTunes style “Cover Flow” history browser.  Although impressed at this point I was impressed at the interface level, I thought and hoped that this wasn’t a mask to hide a lack of improvements under the hood.

Innovative way to view browsing history

Scrolling through the list of 150 improvements and new features within Safari 4 beta, it’s without doubt that Apple are planning for Safari 4 to raise the bar.  Some of these features are quite impressive including ARIA support, improved CSS effects, HTML 5 Offline Support, improved international/cultural compatibility as well as feature rich development tools to name just a few.  However amongst all these new features there was one that I had to test straight away for myself and that was that Safari 4 was ACID 3 compliant.  Could this be true?  With so many other browsers stepping up to the plate and failing after making this claim, I wondered if Safari 4 was going to be the next victim of false claim.  Well any doubts I had were instantly quashed when I seen for my very own eyes, Safari 4 has indeed passed the ACID 3 test.

Safari 4 Beta Passed ACID 3 Test

I then proceeded onto start reading about the ‘Blazing Performance‘ benchmarks.  These claims display information suggesting that Safari 4 is much quicker that the incredibly fast ‘WebKit‘ based cousin Chrome 1.0 at rendering HTML and Javascript, not to mention a white wash on performance over  Internet Explorer 7 & 8 as well as my beloved Firefox 3 browser.  Now as I was using Safari 4, I had noticed that the browser was rendering pages extremely quick.  Without proper benchmarking techniques involving stable, fair testing environments how could I satisfy my curiosity to test Apple’s Safari 4 speed claims.  Now this is when it struck me, I could use the ‘slickspeed‘ test aimed at testing the response times of various well known javascript frameworks.  Although this is by no means an accurate benchmarking suite, I presume that although the figures maybe out somewhat, the patterns of results should be relative to the browsers javascript engine speed.  So with this new arsenal I set out one by one to prove or disprove that Safari 4 could be faster than the competition.

To carry out this test I minimised the amount applications running on my computer and tested each browser one by one to get the following results.

(Mac OSX – 2 Ghz Dual Core, MacBook, 2GB Ram)

(Windows Vista Business – AMD Athalon 64 X2 Dual Core 4000+ 2.11GHz 4GB Ram)

The test I used can be found at http://mootools.net/slickspeed/.

Wow!  These results are impressive.  Not only is Safari 4 showing it’s speed, but Dojo really stood out as well.  I must point out however IE8, reported a great deal of errors when accessing Dojo elements and seemed to be the only browser to do so.  Now before getting too carried away my firefox does contain some additional plugins which no doubt could have slowed the engine down a little, although I had made efforts to keep it slim.  However even with that in mind, there is a clear pattern from these results that Safari 4 is pretty damn fast!  In the name of “who is the fastest browser in the west”, Safari 4 certainly is proving to be a threat. With the immense speed claims from Apple regarding Safari 4  as well as the convincing evidence, what else appeals to me that is included in Safari 4 Beta?

Being a native Firefox user for many years and with all the effort I have taken configuring firefox to provide a development haven which include such plugins as firebug, firephp, developer tools, urlparams and so on, could Safari development tools offer me anything I haven’t already got?  Well interestingly the answer was Yes!  Not only do the development tools offer a very graphical representation of load times and file sizes ‘Resources’, but the development tools now include a javascript debugger which is something I often use in firebug.  Not only this but Safari 4 includes ‘tools for managing offline databases’.  Now I haven’t used the database feature as of yet, but this sounds very interesting and something I am definitely going to investigate.

After looking through the immense list of features and claims the big question is, can Safari 4 do to me what no browser has done to me in the past few years and entice me away from Firefox?  Well I actually think Yes and No.  My development environment in Firefox is setup so well, where I use Zend_Debug to log to firephp and I am quite used to several small, but useful plugins making life easier and more productive such as ‘urlparams ‘.  I can’t see a complete alternative yet fully within Safari 4.  However if I manage to figure out a way in which I can throw log messages to the error console in Safari 4 which might already be possible, Safari 4 could win me over.  In cases where I simply wish to browse the web I do actually think I might start using Safari 4 and see how it holds up, where I shall keep Firefox for development.  All in all though, Safari 4 beta looks promising and Apple have certainly raised the bar in the main stream browser market.  If I were one of the competition I would certainly be paying close attention to this release.

Please note this is by no means an official test or official comparison and should not be considered a stable foundation for browser quality or representation.  This is simply a self test carried out for personal interest and is no way a reflection of the quality or performance of any of the selected software’s integrity.