Safari 3.01 Beta for Windows

The Comparison

While Safari looks nice, we all know that the meat of the matter is performance. Even those few milliseconds of render time saved in one browser might put it head and shoulders over others. In order to get a good feel for how Safari stacks up against the competition, we ran some benchmarking against popular Windows browsers, namely Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9.21 and Firefox 3 (Minefield Alpha).

With the goal of being as true to typeface standards as possible, Safari on Windows sacrifices clarity and sharpness in favour of rounded lettering. Note in particular bolded characters tend to bleed into each other more.

Microsoft is happy to squash the shape of each letter into the pixel boundaries of the screen. This improves on-screen readability in browsers that maintain the Windows default rendering algorithm, but you lose out on the subtle differences between font types at smaller sizes.

The Performance

While it’s difficult to truly form concrete opinions when benching a Beta versus final products (and even an Alpha) it still provides a sense of what we’re in for. We wanted to know the footprint on the system, such as the install size and memory usage, as well as what deviations there were in download speed, standards compliance and CSS rendering. All testing was done on with the following set up - Win XP SP2, Core2 Duo E6300, 2GB DDR2 memory and each test ran 3 times for average results.

	Internet Explorer 7	Firefox 3 (Minefield) Alpha	Opera 9.21	Safari 3.0 (Beta)
Install Size	3.44MB	22.2MB	5.19MB	27.5MB
Memory Usage	38,032KB	29,768KB	23,876KB	50,592KB
MSU Speed Test (1MB file)	10.4 seconds	12.3 seconds	23.6 seconds	Unknown
CSS Rendering Test	250ms	234ms	219ms	31ms
Page load (cnn.com)	11.2 seconds	10.9 seconds	11.1 seconds	9.1 seconds
Acid 2 Test	FAIL	PASS	PASS	PASS
Google Image search “Laserz”	7.3 seconds	6.3 seconds	14.9 seconds	3.6 seconds

So what have we learned? In both memory usage and install Safari is the fatty of the group, which in terms of install size could be indicative of the fact Apple has tried to bundle no less than three other products with the browser, Quicktime, Bonjour and Apple Update. Nasty. Our CSS rendering test comprised of the load time for a page containing roughly 2500 positioned DIVs, with Safari winning out ever so slightly on speed. Safari fared well in a load time comparison for a Google Image search, snappily bringing up a page of associated pictures 2.9 seconds faster than Firefox and leaving Opera for dust.

All the browsers bar IE7 passed the Acid 2 test (a render check for web standards).

The MSU speed test which gives you the total time of a 1MB download, had to be given an ‘unknown’ rating. The MSU speed test and Safari don’t play well together at this point, with the website reporting that on a 1500Kbps ADSL connection, it took 0.0324 seconds to download 1MB. Well, we can dream can’t we?

Where Apple really likes to sound the horn is in relation to Javascript execution time, their website claiming execution of JavaScript up to 2.8 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox.

Our benchmark – using the jsspeed.php webpage, revealed they aren’t actually far off the mark with Opera the only serious competition.

	Internet Explorer 7	Firefox 3 (Minefield) Alpha	Opera 9.21	Safari 3.0 (Beta)
Javascript Speed Test	1500ms	828ms	235ms	187ms

Safari certainly seems to have the guts of a good browser inside it, offering speed where it’s paramount - the rendering of text and images.