Safari 4.0 – or closing the gap to RCP

Apple has released a beta of the next major release of the Safari web browser. Beside having a couple of cool new features like a preview of your top sites on the start page and coverflow for bookmarks/history it introduces the new JavaScript engine “Nitro”. Nitro makes a difference, it makes JavaScript apps much more responsive.

A very brief benchmark showed the following results for the RAP based CRM system we are using:

Startup time (initial loading of the app):

FF3: 4sec
Safari4: 2sec

It seems like Safari is very fast when having to deal with a bulk of JavaScript, approx. 120 KB of compressed JavaScript for building the inital UI. Outperforming Firefox 3 by a factor of 2.

Switching between Overview and Contacts perspective a couple of times and calculating the average leeds to the following results:

FF3: 1s
Safari4: 0.8s

The difference may seem insignificant, but it feels like the difference between a slightly sluggish and a very responsive system. Now, switching between the resources perspective and the plugin development perspective in my Eclipse IDE takes approx. 0.5 seconds on my system. The gap is getting smaller.

Not to mention startup times ….

With the new RAP 1.1 service release which is part of Ganymede SR2 we are now also supporting key navigation in table and tree for Safari – version 3 and 4.