Last week, the fine folks who work on Safari announced their latest JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme (SFX). I’m not normally one to run nightly browser builds, but in light of my recent performance testing, I decided to give this one a shot.
My first impression was that this is definitely not production-ready code. The browser crashed several times on me during the process of capturing the benchmark. But when I did get the tests to run, it was fast. I mean visibly fast. Much faster than anything else I have on hand.
As before, the testing wasn’t extensive. I still haven’t tested Firefox 3 with TraceMonkey. The only test I performed this time was running the Safari nightly through Dromaeo. Here’s how it stacks up against the others:
Safari with SFX ran the test in 8184.6ms. The exact build of Safari used for this test is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/528+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.21. The nighly package that I downloaded was labeled WebKit-r36647.