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Monday 11th February 2008

Safari builds 250% speed increase 2:01PM, Monday 11th February 2008

The WebKit development team has significantly enhanced the performance of the rendering engine that powers Safari.

Recent builds of the WebKit browser are reported to be up to two and a half times faster than Safari 3, and as much as six times faster than Firefox in tests run on a Mac.

The WebKit team's<



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Surfin' Safari and Planet WebKit blogs have yet to mention what changes they have made to achieve the speed increases. But it does seem evident that the work that has been done to optimise OS X and applications for the iPhone and iPod touch is paying off on the desktop.

The WebKit browser is a standalone version of Safari that can be run (and removed) without affecting the existing Safari installation or settings. Nightly builds are available from nightly.webkit.org.

Once the developer builds have been integrated into OS X via a Safari or system update, the speed improvements will also be available to other software that uses the WebKit engine, including the OS X Help Viewer, the OmniWeb, iCab, and Shiira browsers, RSS readers, web development applications and email and instant messaging clients.

Simon Aughton

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