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Firefox 3 may have beaten Apple’s Safari in several tests, but Safari is still the best browser in the market at JavaScript. Webkit recently adopted the SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter, and we can definitely see a speed increase. The current build of Webkit and Safari 3.1.1 are ahead of both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7/8 b1. Zimbra performed these tests to find which browser would give the best user experience with the Zimbra Web client. The SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter in Safari 4 is a bytecode engine, and Webkit claims it’s 1.6 times faster than the current JS engine in Safari 3.1.1 Why is SquirrelFish making Safari so much faster? The Zimbra blog explains why.

SquirrelFish does its magic by turning JavaScript script into so-called bytecodes, an optimized code much more suitable for run-time execution than natural language-based commands, which are longer and more complicated to interpret – and therefore are slower.

I wouldn’t called Safari a winner of the browser wars now, because JavaScript isn’t the only part of the web and other browsers have some better features. But, it does show one of Safari’s strenghts. After learning this, I’ll be using Safari when using any JavaScript web apps.

Via [Zimbra Blog]