Step aside, Chrome, for Squirrelfish Extreme

Just about every browser out there now is trying to grab the crown for fastest performance for running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many increasingly sophisticated Web-based applications. The latest development is from the programmers behind Apple's Safari.

Mozilla bragged earlier this month about TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine due to ship in Firefox 3.1 near the end of 2008. Next came Google's Chrome, a leading feature of which is the performance of its V8 JavaScript engine. Now the WebKit programmers, whose open-source code is used in Apple's Safari browser and the Konqueror browser of the KDE interface software sometimes used on Linux systems, have a new version of their JavaScript technology.

It's called Squirrelfish Extreme, and the WebKit programmers said Thursday in a blog posting that it's more than twice as fast as the first-generation Squirrelfish announced in June and more than three times faster than the current WebKit 3.1 version. They based their conclusions on one benchmark, SunSpider.

"SquirrelFish Extreme uses more advanced techniques, including fast native code generation, to deliver even more JavaScript performance," the programmers said.

For details of Squirrelfish's techniques--bytecode optimization, a polymorphic inline cache, a context-threaded just-in-time compiler, and a regular expression just-in-time compiler--check the WebKit blog.

Charles Ying also performed SunSpider tests that showed Squirrelfish beating Google's V8 and Mozilla's Tracemonkey on a 2.4GHz iMac.

WebKit's SquirrelFish Extreme is faster than its three-month-old predecessor on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark.

(Credit: WebKit)

[Lerianis]

Hey, coding is ALWAYS getting better, and I'm not surprised to see Google Chrome being 'one-upped'.... though I am surprised that it came so darn fast!

[MadLyb]

We need to see metrics beyond one tool.

As we have found in the hardware space, it is easy to make a product perform well under one testing system.

[trevorbsmith]

Your comment "Now the WebKit programmers, whose open-source code is used in Apple's Safari browser and the Konqueror browser" is potentially confusing. WebKit is ALSO the rendering engine used by Google Chrome, not just Safari and Konqueror.

[Shankland]

True, but WebKit's JavaScript engine is not used in Chrome. Chrome's JavaScript engine is called V8 and was written from scratch.

[blues_coup]

Indeed. Chrome uses all Webkit code, including the inspector, to render webpages. As far as I know the only difference is the bindings for V8. Also, SquirrelFish Extreme has been available in the webkit nightly builds for almost 2 weeks.

[victor_sf]

Aach, good old Konqueror - I liked it so much in the olden days.

[krosavcheg]

Hey Morons:

This chart is meaningless without telling us what the chart is measuring. Do the bars and their associated totals mean milliseconds to complete a test? Without an explanation, one would assume an article about speed is about time to complete -- in which case longer bars are worse. not better.

A quick follow to the WebKit blog explains that the chart represents runs per minute, but CNET writers and editors are too lazy to even cut and paste accurately.

[monkeyfun14]

Well they said its faster so one could assume that longer bars are better?

I don't see why people need to be spoon fed all the time honestly.

[geshirk]

The annotation below the graph, "WebKit's SquirrelFish Extreme is faster than its three-month-old predecessor on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark", is pretty clear to me: the longer the bar the faster the performance

Maybe the annotation was added after krosavcheg's rude post