Safari 4.0 Beta vs. Safari 3.2.1 Benchmarks

Yesterday, Apple released a beta version of Safari 4.0 on both Windows and Mac OS X... and it's faaaast. Using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, we can see huge improvements in speed going from Safari 3.2.1 to Safari 4.0. Safari 4.0 is in a whole other league. Previously Firefox 3.0.6 had the edge over Safari, but the new version of Safari is now also several times as fast as Firefox.

Cube G4 450 with 768 MB RAM

Safari 3.2.1 Run 1: 70637.8 ms
Safari 3.2.1 Run 2: 35922.4 ms
Firefox 3.0.6: 25779.6 ms
Safari 4.0 Beta Run 1: 16029.8 ms
Safari 4.0 Beta Run 2: 12592.4 ms

MacBook Core 2 Duo 2.1 GHz with 2 GB RAM

Safari 3.2.1: 3739.6 ms
Firefox 3.0.6: 3440.0 ms
Safari 4.0 Beta: 867.0 ms

As you can see, with modern Intel dual-core machines, browsing was already fast. However, the new Safari 4.0 breathes new life into our old PowerPC Macs too.

Safari 4 is much faster than Safari 3 on Windows too. Unfortunately, the Windows version seems much more unstable, so I won't be using it until it gets some more updates.

[Update 2009-02-25]

Cube G4 1.7 GHz: 5648.8 ms

Nice. Now only if Adobe could speed up Flash.

By the way, this is what I get when I try to run the SunSpider bench on my Cube G4 450 with Firefox 2.0.0.16: