Appletell

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]

Just after my recent Safari rant, Apple publishes an update.  This version, 3.1.1, fixes 39MB worth of security issues and bugs, one of which was the one that allowed a hacker to get full access of a MacBook Air at a recent PWN2OWN conference.  This update deals with four specific bugs and, in my opinion, is a very good step in the right direction.

More specifically, this update fixed an issue involving the way WebKit handled a host name containing a semi colon in the URL.  This bug, according to Apple, could allow a malicious URL to gain access to a machine.  Another issue fixed consisted of buffer overflows while handling JavaScript expressions.  This update is for both Mac users and Windows users, so be sure to download it for a more secure machine.

You can finds Apple’s detailed notes on this release at their site.