Category: developers journal

Safari 4 on Windows benchmarked – faster than Chrome?

Author: seven June 9, 2009

Yes, v4.0! This is pretty strange, because I blogged few days ago about Safari 3 on Windows. Apple probably timed Safari 4 release with release of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Don’t know what to say. Browser GUI looks looks remarkably like the one in Chrome (notice the new page and gear icons to the right). They removed loading progress from address bar which makes me sad but they added Windows standard font smoothing which now makes surfing in Safari more bearable. There is not no-smoothing option however.

CNET benchmarked Safari 4 and they say it’s 42x faster than IE 7 and 3.5x faster than Firefox 3. Since I am hard nut and I don’t believe CNET because I think Apple paid for those benchmarks, I used Futuremark’s Peacekeeper browser benchmark to do my own benchmarking. Check out results for your self (higher values are better), no need to say how surprised I am:

# browser Peacekeeper score
1. Safari 4 2956
2. Chrome 2.0.172.28 2624
3. FireFox 3.0.10 (-safe-mode) 1122
4. FireFox 3.0.10 (packed with extensions) 955
5. Internet Explorer 8 732

I did benchmarking on my laptop running Vista w/ Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T8100 and NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS.

safari4_capture

Author
seven
CEO/CTO at Nivas®
Neven Jacmenović has been passionately involved with computers since late 80s, the age of Atari and Commodore Amiga. As one of internet industry pioneers in Croatia, since 90s, he has been involved in making of many award winning, innovative and successful online projects. He is an experienced full stack web developer, analyst and system engineer. In his spare time, Neven is transforming retro-futuristic passion into various golang, Adobe Flash and JavaScript/WebGL projects.