This is definitely true, the nightly builds of WebKit right now are incredibly fast. But, the shipping version of Safari is also much much faster than Firefox 2, and is still faster than Firefox 3 Beta. Safari has come a long way in a short time, it's an incredible browser.
Apple has open source figured out. It's the prefect fusion: the core technologies (http://webkit.org) are open source, but they manage the UI like no one else can. Software with style, the way it should be. The WebKit team is absolutely fantastic too, I miss them.
Yes, it started as KHTML, but Apple has taken it to a new level.
The KHTML and WebKit guys have had their differences in the past, but I believe KHTML is trying to merge all of the WebKit improvements back into KHTML, hopefully eventually unforking the two:
It's also worth noting that Apple could have used a different engine, or started from scratch.
Similarly, they could have chosen not to open source the darwin kernel, and they could have based it on something other than BSD.
The point was that Apple seems to know when to choose open source technology and leverage it, and when to start from scratch and build their own proprietary system.
Apple competes with open source all the time. Linux is the most obvious example, but most consumer open source software competes with either Apple or MS, and open source is almost always losing. I think what makes this unique is that Firefox is an unusually well designed product that appeals to the average consumer in ways most open source software does not. It also had a head start, and has a huge user base.
In fact, you could argue that unlike usual, Apple is actually winning on technology, and not usability, since perhaps the biggest advantage to firefox is its ability to install plugins.
Where did you come up with that assumption? A quick (very unscientific) test of a big web application (over 100 JavaScript and image files) shows you're wrong...
(first column is seconds with empty cache, second column is seconds after cache was filled)
Again, these are very rough numbers (I took the best out of about 3 runs) on a pretty slow machine (1.33GHz G4). Perhaps the numbers would be different for simple static pages, but I don't have a good way to time that.
I don't know if I'm reading this right, but think they aren't competing with "open source" in a general sense, since Webkit is open source. Or maybe you meant "with" in the "using" sense: "It's pretty impressive that Apple can compete using open source. I forgot that was possible."
Opera has been far faster than Firefox (I believe) since inception. It remained my browser of choice until Firebug tipped me over: I gained much from being able to run hundreds of tabs simultaneously. I'm thrilled with the news.
A warning before switching to the latest nightlies (http://nightly.webkit.org/): Gmail doesn't seem to be supported. Spoofing the user agent to pretend to be Safari 2.0.4 does load the page, but none of the links work.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 66.7 ms ] threadThe KHTML and WebKit guys have had their differences in the past, but I believe KHTML is trying to merge all of the WebKit improvements back into KHTML, hopefully eventually unforking the two:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/23/the-unf...
Similarly, they could have chosen not to open source the darwin kernel, and they could have based it on something other than BSD.
The point was that Apple seems to know when to choose open source technology and leverage it, and when to start from scratch and build their own proprietary system.
In fact, you could argue that unlike usual, Apple is actually winning on technology, and not usability, since perhaps the biggest advantage to firefox is its ability to install plugins.
AFAIK Opera 9.5 Beta is still faster than these two browsers.
(first column is seconds with empty cache, second column is seconds after cache was filled)
Again, these are very rough numbers (I took the best out of about 3 runs) on a pretty slow machine (1.33GHz G4). Perhaps the numbers would be different for simple static pages, but I don't have a good way to time that.Of course, the scientific method means this tests should be reproducible by everyone, and YMMV, but I wasn't talking bullshit, just see the page.
Or maybe you were just talking about Firefox...