Just a small follow-up of the webkit benchmark results. I ran it in Webkit 28949 on my Powerbook G4 667MHz Gigabit Ethernet and it appears to be 10 times as slow as webkit on my Mac Pro. The amazing thing is however, that those 10 times still not make it unusable. So I'm still not convinced I should buy a new laptop.
Zaaf
Webkit.org, the open-source rendering engine behind Apple's Safari browser and KDE's Konquerer Browser release a javascript benchmark the other day. It's called SunSpider and you can try it out yourself here. Naturally, I could not resist to try it on the few browsers I have lying around here. And to my surprise the fastest one was the webkit version running under Parallels.
Here are the details:
So IE7 is horribly slow, mainly due to their text handling. Firefox is faster than IE, but consistently slower than Safari. But it really surprised me to se that IE was so much slower (27x) than webkit. Granted, it is a webkit benchmark so they should do very good in there. I only hope that they cover all javascript areas and did not leave out any where they perform poorly. Not because that it skews these results, but mainly because when left out of this benchmark, the webkit javascript team won't notice that they need to improve this area.
But all in all Webkit looks like it has IE beat.
Zaaf
