Chicago (IL) – A new browser war unfolds as browser makers are rapidly improving JavaScript engines to capture the ultimate prize - your desktop. Apple's new SquirrelFish Extreme engine promises a two-fold speed increase and may put Safari 4 ahead of the pack. However, given the breathtaking development pace of other browser makers, it is far from certain that Safari 4 will be the fastest browser on the planet when it debuts. Mozilla, Google and Microsoft as well as smaller makers such as Opera are all working on more nimble and faster engines.
Apple raised the stakes of the browser game with Safari for Windows, but the SquirrelFish JavaScript (JS) engine may escalate the current browser battle between Firefox and Internet Explorer with a third serious player. Introduced this summer as a replacement for Safari 3.1's JS engine, the technology is now being replaced by a newer SquirrelFish Extreme engine unveiled last week. Aimed to accelerate Safari 4, it sports "bytecode optimizations, polymorphic inline caching, a lightweight context threaded just-in-time compiler, and a new regular expression engine that uses our JIT infrastructure."
The enhancements deliver "nearly twice" the performance over the original SquirrelFish in the commonly used SunSpider benchmark and "over 10 times the speed you saw in Safari 3.0, less than a year ago," Apple said. The Safari 4/SquirrelFish Extreme combo is likely to outpace other current browsers, which mainly includes Firefox 3.1/TraceMonkey, Chrome/V8 and IE8.
Byte-code optimization
SquirrelFish sparked the byte-code optimization race this summer. The technique turns natural-language based JavaScript code into an optimized representation tailored to faster run-time execution. SquirrelFish engine was 1.6x faster in the SunSpider benchmark than the JavaScriptCore engine currently used in Safari 3.1. Weeks later, Mozilla released Firefox 3 but its JS engine called SpiderMonkey did not outpace Safari 4/SquirrelFish.
Chrome brought its own byte-code engine dubbed V8, developed by a team of Googlees in Denmark. It beats all current browsers on the market in terms of JS performance. Mozilla will answer with a byte-code optimized TraceMonkey engine that will power Firefox 3.1. It beats V8 and SquirrelFish in the SunSpider benchmark, but it can't touch the new SquirrelFish Extreme. But Apple is not the only beneficiary of these gains.
Who will benefit from WebKit improvements?
Safari is based on WebKit, an open source application framework that Apple derived from the Konqueror browser. WebKit is maintained and shared by Apple, Google, Nokia and others and powers desktop browsers like Safari, Chrome, iCab, Omniweb and Adobe AIR. Its lightweight and flexible code base make it a natural fit for mobile devices. Safari for iPhone, Android and Nokia's Series S60 browser are all WebKit-based. WebKit consists of a layout rendering engine WebCore responsible for rendering HTML, CSS code as well as a JS engine called JavaScriptCore.
The latter will be replaced by SquirrelFish Extreme and most WebKit browsers will benefit from speed gains. SquirrelFish Extreme benefits will trickle down not just into Safari for desktops, but also to Nokia's Series S60 browser, Safari for iPhone, etc. Non-WebKit-based browser like IE8 and Firefox 3.1 will not benefit, nor will Chrome which only relies on WebKit's WebCore layout engine but uses its own V8 JS engine. The upcoming mobile version of Firefox code-named Fennec, apparently slated for a 2009 release, will be based on a Gecko/TraceMonkey combination.
Your desktop is up for grabs
As browser vendors beat each other in the JS performance arena, your desktop – and not the title of the fastest browser - is the main prize. With Firefox and Safari slowly but steadily taking market share away from IE, it is a matter of time before IE falls below 70%. If IE8 underwhelms in terms of speed, competing browsers are more than likely to accelerate their growth at the expense of IE. Industry watchers predict that Microsoft's desktop dominance will be in danger if IE’s share is reduced to 60%.
Browser software already has become the de facto operating system for web applications. With a shift to cloud computing, the industry is nearing an inflexion point when Windows will no longer be necessary. Even at this point we can clearly see how a host operating system slowly becomes reduced to the back-bone that runs a web browser. In the not so distant future, the desktop operating system may cease to exist as we know it. The painting is on the wall.
Apple raised the stakes of the browser game with Safari for Windows, but the SquirrelFish JavaScript (JS) engine may escalate the current browser battle between Firefox and Internet Explorer with a third serious player. Introduced this summer as a replacement for Safari 3.1's JS engine, the technology is now being replaced by a newer SquirrelFish Extreme engine unveiled last week. Aimed to accelerate Safari 4, it sports "bytecode optimizations, polymorphic inline caching, a lightweight context threaded just-in-time compiler, and a new regular expression engine that uses our JIT infrastructure."
The enhancements deliver "nearly twice" the performance over the original SquirrelFish in the commonly used SunSpider benchmark and "over 10 times the speed you saw in Safari 3.0, less than a year ago," Apple said. The Safari 4/SquirrelFish Extreme combo is likely to outpace other current browsers, which mainly includes Firefox 3.1/TraceMonkey, Chrome/V8 and IE8.
Byte-code optimization
SquirrelFish sparked the byte-code optimization race this summer. The technique turns natural-language based JavaScript code into an optimized representation tailored to faster run-time execution. SquirrelFish engine was 1.6x faster in the SunSpider benchmark than the JavaScriptCore engine currently used in Safari 3.1. Weeks later, Mozilla released Firefox 3 but its JS engine called SpiderMonkey did not outpace Safari 4/SquirrelFish.
Chrome brought its own byte-code engine dubbed V8, developed by a team of Googlees in Denmark. It beats all current browsers on the market in terms of JS performance. Mozilla will answer with a byte-code optimized TraceMonkey engine that will power Firefox 3.1. It beats V8 and SquirrelFish in the SunSpider benchmark, but it can't touch the new SquirrelFish Extreme. But Apple is not the only beneficiary of these gains.
Who will benefit from WebKit improvements?
Safari is based on WebKit, an open source application framework that Apple derived from the Konqueror browser. WebKit is maintained and shared by Apple, Google, Nokia and others and powers desktop browsers like Safari, Chrome, iCab, Omniweb and Adobe AIR. Its lightweight and flexible code base make it a natural fit for mobile devices. Safari for iPhone, Android and Nokia's Series S60 browser are all WebKit-based. WebKit consists of a layout rendering engine WebCore responsible for rendering HTML, CSS code as well as a JS engine called JavaScriptCore.
The latter will be replaced by SquirrelFish Extreme and most WebKit browsers will benefit from speed gains. SquirrelFish Extreme benefits will trickle down not just into Safari for desktops, but also to Nokia's Series S60 browser, Safari for iPhone, etc. Non-WebKit-based browser like IE8 and Firefox 3.1 will not benefit, nor will Chrome which only relies on WebKit's WebCore layout engine but uses its own V8 JS engine. The upcoming mobile version of Firefox code-named Fennec, apparently slated for a 2009 release, will be based on a Gecko/TraceMonkey combination.
Your desktop is up for grabs
As browser vendors beat each other in the JS performance arena, your desktop – and not the title of the fastest browser - is the main prize. With Firefox and Safari slowly but steadily taking market share away from IE, it is a matter of time before IE falls below 70%. If IE8 underwhelms in terms of speed, competing browsers are more than likely to accelerate their growth at the expense of IE. Industry watchers predict that Microsoft's desktop dominance will be in danger if IE’s share is reduced to 60%.
Browser software already has become the de facto operating system for web applications. With a shift to cloud computing, the industry is nearing an inflexion point when Windows will no longer be necessary. Even at this point we can clearly see how a host operating system slowly becomes reduced to the back-bone that runs a web browser. In the not so distant future, the desktop operating system may cease to exist as we know it. The painting is on the wall.