RSSApple's Safari 4 Beta for Windows speeds up after security update
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published May 14, 2009, 1:18 PM
Earlier this week, Apple posted security updates for both its production and experimental versions of its Safari browser, for both Mac and Windows platforms. But Betanews tests indicate that the company may have sneaked in a few performance improvements as well, as the experimental browser posted its best index score yet: above 15 times better performance than Internet Explorer 7 in the same system.
After some security updates to Windows Vista, Betanews performed a fresh round of browser performance tests on the latest production and experimental builds. That made our test virtual platform (see page 2 for some notes about our methodology) a little faster overall, and while many browsers appeared to benefit including Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, the very latest Mozilla experimental browsers in the post-3.5 Beta 4 tracks clearly did not. For the first time, we're including the latest production build of Apple Safari 3 in our tests (version 3.2.3, also patched this week) as well as Opera 9.64. Safari 4, however, posted better times than even our test system's general acceleration would allow on its own.
In our first tests of the Safari 4 public beta against the most recent edition of Google Chrome 2 last month, we noted Safari scored about 10% better than Chrome 2, that company's experimental build. Since that time, there's been a few shakedowns of Chrome 2, and a few security updates to Vista.
Those Vista speed improvements of about 4% overall were reflected in our latest IE8 and Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 test scores. After applying the latest updates, we noticed IE8 performance improve immediately, by almost 13% over last month to 2.47 -- meaning, about 247% better performance than Internet Explorer 7 on the same platform. While Google Chrome posted better numbers this month over last, neither version may have benefitted from the Vista speed boost very much, with Chrome 1 jumping 2.4% over last month to 11.9, but Chrome 2 faring better, improving almost 6% to 13.84.
Safari 4's speed gains were closer to 8% over last month, with a record index score of 15.5 in our latest test. This while the latest developmental builds of Firefox 3.5 not-yet-public Beta 5 ("Shiretoko" track) and 3.6 Alpha 1 ("Minefield" track) were both noticeably slower than even 3.5 Beta 4. This was a head scratcher, so we repeated the test four times, refreshing the circumstances each time (that's why the report I'd planned for yesterday ended up being posted today), with our results confirmed each time.
We started fresh with Opera, this time testing both the production and preview builds for the first time. Opera 9.64 put in a score very comparable to Safari 3.2.3, at 5.94 versus 5.64, respectively. But our latest download of the Opera 10 preview kicked performance up more than a notch, with a nice 15.4% improvement over last month to 6.21.
Next: A word on methodology...
Safar 4 beta in Windows 7 VHD environment may be a more level playing field on an XP machine don't you think? (not an expert opinion here) After downloading both of the Safari beta 4 May 12 updates, they would not install. Rec'd. error messages 'file missing', any ideas? Thanks for reply.
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|Hi I am Joseph Letzelter, Your article is very fine.
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|People still use Safari on things other they apple control devices? You got an App for that?
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|Yeah Safari 4 on Windows is ugly and steals from Chrome. 3.0's UI wasn't bad. But who cares? I stopped using Safari since Apple doesn't get the meaning of "update". Every "update" including a very minor fix means downloading the whole bloated installer again, uninstalling the earlier one and installing this one.
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|except not since they're using the same underlying code base minus v8 javascript engine and gears internals rather than html5 unfinished standards.
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|Any chance you could post the freaking specs of the machines? Have you EVER seen benchmarks without the specs (hardware AND software, patches/drivers listed?) Typically you want to post something that others can reproduce, scientific method and all.
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|Have you actually seen Safari 4 on Windows? It may be the ugliest browser ever. They actually put the tabs in the transparent (Vista/win7) title bar! I'll sacrifice some speed in a javascript test to have something worth looking at.
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|looks fine to me on windows but then again, i dont like fugly windows gui since i have taste. living in a dumpster you shouldnt complain about the food you eat.
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|This shouldn't come as a surprise. Safari is developed by the world's greatest company of all time. Safari will always be the fastest browser. It is screaming fast on a Mac.
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|Speed alone doesn't make a browser excellent. Safari 4 is lesser than it's competitors in all other aspects other than speed, and the speed of Safari 4 at this point in time compared to FF 3.5 is pretty much negligible to the human eye. The only features that are unique to safari 4 at this point in time are:
Topsites- large thumbnails of your most viewed pages
Coverflow bookmarks- what more can I say?
However,
- Top sites is pretty useless unless it's the default page on load.
- Coverflow for bookmarks is eye candy and it's a GUI nightmare IMO. Coverflow is sort of useful in itunes because you can recognise the colors/shapes of your album art but with Safari 4, your websites gets updated automatically, therefore you can't recognise the sites- so you still need to read the list to choose your bookmarks, rendering the coverflow useless.
Safari 4 still provides no way to easily manage addons and still disappoints.
Safari's trump card (speed) is being matched, and it has nothing left to offer in my opinion.
It's not a good browser.
I have OS X and enjoy using it at times, but I'm 100% sure Safari 4 is not part of my "Mac experience" (which is not as awesome as you like to preach) and now it's gathering dust in my applications folder.
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|I do like firefox 3.5 on a Mac but Firefox's lack of a native feel keeps me from making it my default browser. Unfortunately Firefox uses XUL which feels clunky, slow and sometimes very foreign on a Mac. Safari is a good browser as well but tabs no longer pop out if you've set all new window links to open in a new tab instead. This wasn't the case in Safari 3.5. Now when I visit a site such as MSNBC to view video news, the videos open in a new tab instead of popping out. It looks awkward. I hope this changes in the final release.
In the meantime, I've grown quite fond of Camino 2 beta 3, which has awesome speed and is a coca app so it is completely native to Mac OS X. It also uses the same gecko 1.9 engine in Firefox. It lacks some features but it is a very lightweight and fast browser. It loads up really fast and blends some of the best features and functionality of both Firefox and Safari.
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|Safari 4 is a great browser. It kicks butt with 100% on the latest Acid test (an unheard of score until now) and is NOTICEABLY faster than firefox.
I think it looks great - nice streamlined use of space. However it's still only my backup because of the great plugins I have in firefox.
Nice work Apple. If you can write a browser for a competitor's OS (Windows) that is so overwhelmingly superior to Microsoft's own IE browser, than I can only imagine how much better your OS probably is than Windoze. I think I'll give it a try!
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|safari has THE best RSS reading, text searching, and performance. It's built in debugging controls for javascript and html are pretty nice too. people saying it sucks obviously haven't used it enough to know what a real browser is.
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|I installed it too on my Mac. Not sure I like that tab bar at the very top though. Sure it's fast but I'm not impress with the layout. And on Windows XP it looks even worse.
I hope the RC or final build will improve.
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|"I began using VMs was so that I could maintain a kind of white-box environment for applications being tested with an operating system. In such an environment, there are no anti-malware or anti-virus or firewall apps to slow the system down or to place another variable on applications' performance. I can always keep a clean, almost blank environment as a backup should I ever install something that compromises the Registry or makes relative performance harder to judge."
Install the OSes on bare-metal, ghost or TrueImage or w/e the OS. Re-image the system for each new test. We're talking 10 minutes an image here. VM's post crap results. Period.
"If I were testing them in a faster system or on a bare bones physical machine, I'd expect the relative index numbers to be the same."
Great expectations often lead to great disappointments. Unless you've verified this in testing, your "expectations" mean exactly squat.
"Think of it like geometry: No matter how big a triangle may be, the angles measure up the same, they add up to 180, and its sides have the same proportionate length."
...until the triangle becomes a square.
But since you're getting that test-system, I guess it's all moot. :) Good to hear.
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|+1 for not using VMs, safari may still get better results just don't use VM's :P
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|As said before, and I see is being rectified in this article, VM's are not a good way to test performance. Performance should be on a real platform not being virtualized. I say also that you should include a graph and breakdown what these numbers mean. Numbers are meaningless, percentages especially, unless we have some frame of reference to understand their meaning with.
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|Yes, it's a silly way of testing performance, especially as the host PC can affect performance in unpredictable ways. The only way of doing it properly is to have a clean-install PC with nothing else on it. The installation can be imaged, so getting the same exact base install every time. To do otherwise is foolhardy and simply lazy practice. I, along with other people who really care about performance tests will be ignoring Betanews articles claims on performance from now on.
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|@testman:
Even with the knowledge that the methodology behind the tests is changing (to bare-metal vs VM)?
Harsh...
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|I'm pretty sure it didn't say that when I posted the comment. Still, at least they're actually realising that bare metal clean-installs are simply better than using VMs as it ensures NOTHING else can skew the results, however small.
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