Test the Speed of Your Safari 1.3

As we noted in our Mac OS X 10.3.9 hands-on report, Safari 1.3 seems to be much faster than v1.2. According to Dave Hyatt on his blog, Surfin' Safari, the new Safari 1.3 in Mac OS X 10.3.9 Update loads Web pages 35% faster than Safari 1.2 and has better JavaScript performance:

Page Load Performance
Safari 1.3 loads pages overall 35% faster than 1.2 as measured by IBench. In addition to improving the overall page load, Safari 1.3 will display content sooner than 1.2 did, so that subresources don't hold up the initial display of the page.

JavaScript Performance
We have substantially improved the performance of the JavaScript engine in Safari. I encourage you to check out Safari 1.3 on this benchmark for example to see the improvement relative to 1.2.

It also has the same "guts" as the coming Safari 2.0 in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. You can test Safari 1.3's JavaScript speed with BenchJS from this Web site.

We ran BenchJS twice with our dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 and got the 16th and 17th fastest times for any browser and OS at 5.68 and 5.69 sec. They were the 3rd and 4th fourth fastest times listed for Mac OS X. The two faster OS X times used Opera 8. The fastest combination seems to Opera 8 with Windows XP according to tests listed on the BenchJS Web page. [Bill Fox]