It uses the best engines; the Webkit HTML engine, and the Nitro Javascript engine. Both are the most compliant out of all the browsers, and are fast as hell. Until you put browsers under immense pressure of what I like to call the next-generation of web (stuff which isn’t possible today because 80% of people just don’t have a fast enough browser), you don’t realize how fast Webkit is in comparison to Firefox!

As a developer, it feels important to me to built on a solid foundation which will be displayed as expected (as per the specs), and be more resilient to early (un-optimized) prototypes. Then I can go optimize everything enough for Firefox and IE where required.

Google chrome isn’t far behind (uses Webkit and the V8 engine), so it should catch up this year. And hopefully Firefox 3.6 will start to improve performance wise since 3.5 is approaching a stable release. Now, if IE would just hurry up and die, it’d make me very happy…

It represents the new web, the one we might see from Opera and Firefox in 6 months and Microsoft in 2010 or 2011.

Anyway, it’s not that stuff we were using waaaay back in 2008.

It’s quite impressive.

One thing most people on this site forget about is that not everyone upgrades their computer every 2 years. Much like I’m sure you don’t upgrade your car every 2 years. This goes for most things. There are companies which run systems that are up to 40 years old! You know why? Its unpractical and its too expensive.

This is precisely the big selling point of having a “fast browser” (i.e. Chrome). You can run it on almost ANY machine no matter how fast or how slow and it always works – fast.

Now you might ask, “whats the geezer on about? Safari 4 works fine for me, hes just a noob”. Well then listen.Ii’m using a fairly old computer here and the new Safari 4 takes A LOT longer to boot up than Chrome. I’m talking like Firefox 3.0 slow. To ANY user who has a machine like this, you’ve completely over promised and under delivered with your “speed claim”. The same goes for its JS engine. It doesn’t feel as fast as Chrome’s on older machines (feels roughly the same on faster machines).

TopSites? What TopSites? Safari4 automatically disables this feature if it detects your specs aren’t high enough. WTF? Seriously guys, its just a thumbnail aggregation of websites you most commonly visit. You DO NOT need high specs to run this. It works super fast and super fine in Chrome. Heck, I can get a Firefox extension and it works without a problem there too. So why not in Safari4?

This is the problem with most of these “Apple innovations”. They over focus on visual aesthetics.

Take the developer tools as an example. They will never be as good as Firebug’s until they focus on what’s truly appropriate – practicality. Compare the two Resource inspectors (or the Net tab in Firebug). Firebug gives you a quick overview of whats been downloaded and how long it took. You can do a quick scan, see how long those files took to load and go back to optimising. In Safari, they make some big blob of a graphics mess where you have to roll your mouse over every item to see how long it took load. Why couldn’t they just place it beside the item? Because they focused on visual aesthetics rather than making it a bit less attractive but more practical.

Sorry Apple. Some of your products rock (the Time Machine) but some will never win a big share of the market.

P.S. Also, as if force me to download ITunes + QuickTime with your auto update.

I stick to firefox all along. Don’t say it is the fastest or has features others lack. firefox just makes me feel comfy surfin’ the web. I actually can’t wait for a new firefox release to set a download record. firefox 3 made one last june, didn’t it?