WebKit Gives Konqueror a Speed Boost (Past Firefox) 199
An anonymous reader writes "We always knew that WebKit is going to make Konqueror fast; but how much faster? Today we test that by putting Konqueror with KHTML through the SunSpider JavaScript Test and the then do the same with WebKit. To get an idea of how fast they are compared to other browsers, we also decided to put Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 through the tests."
How important are JavaScript times? (Score:5, Interesting)
How important are JavaScript times to the overall speed of rendering pages?
Is it like comparing 0-60 times for cars (a decent indication of performance, though not the best)? Or is a bit like measuring the time from 0-10 in first gear - a rather insiginificant proportion of the whole time taken to render a cross-section of typical web pages?
Do sites just concentrate of JavaScript performance so much because it's easier to measure?
So the real question is (Score:5, Interesting)
Is work continuing on KHTML, and -- if so -- why? I mean, KHTML surely has some stuff going for it (it was the basis for WebKit), but it seems like there's a really clear winner.
Re:How important are JavaScript times? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know about you, but the only time a page doesn't load instantly is when it has large content waiting for data to come down through my Internet "Service" "Provider" or chew on some Javascript. I've never seen HTML take long at all, unless it's a 200k+ behemoth.
Results for Firefox3.6,Chromium,Opera Ubuntu (Score:2, Interesting)
Firefox-3.5.9-Linux: 2331.6ms
Opera-10.61-Linux: 868.2ms
Chromium-6.0.492.0-Linux: 865.6ms
I would have posted links to the results but apparently there were too many non-letter characters per line (even with the links inside href attribs).
Re:How important are JavaScript times? (Score:3, Interesting)
Who cares? The fact is that most of the web is documents, not applications. Javascript performance is largely irrelevant when rendering Wikipedia or Google. So why does anybody care about its speed?
Re:So the real question is (Score:3, Interesting)
KHTML may live on (!) as System HTML renderer, help renderer, whatever renderer and for people who chooses stability/robustness over "web 2.0" things like most insane javascript performance ever!
Not just that, Webkit stuff comes to KHTML too. They could be just a bit conservative since they have a OS (yea, minus drivers and kernel) which runs happily on 3 different architectures which has nothing to do with each other.
You wouldn't want Konqueror to crash while you move critical files around with it, you know there is no cool "plugin dead, disabled" dialogue in that case :)
Funny that Webkit is kinda sponsored by "us", Apple users and yet we understand the importance of a stable, standards compliant, low memory using and dependable light html renderer.