The JavaScript Engine war has started, the WebKit team wants to apol­o­gize for toast­ing V8 (Google Chrome) in public. With SFX (Squir­relFish Extreme) the WebKit team has taken the com­pet­i­tive lead with their highly advanced JavaScript Engine, which is fea­tur­ing a high-​performance byte­code inter­preter. It’s nice for us tech-​heads but also for con­sumers. The web is finally evolv­ing again…
26-09-2008: WebKit is the first browser engine to fully pass Acid3. A while back, it scored 100/100 and matched the ref­er­ence ren­der­ing. Now, thanks to recent speedups in JavaScript, DOM and ren­der­ing, it passed the third con­di­tion, smooth ani­ma­tion on ref­er­ence hardware.

Google announced today that they would be releas­ing a new open source web browser called Google Chrome. The new browser will be avail­able for down­load as a beta start­ing tomor­row. Google states that the reason for a new web browser is that the com­pany believes that it “can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive inno­va­tion on the web.” The new browser is said to be “streamlined and simple” and “clean and fast”. The under­ly­ing ren­der­ing engine is based on Webkit which is also used by Apple’s Safari. Under the hood, we were able to build the foun­da­tion of a browser that runs today’s com­plex web appli­ca­tions much better.

By keep­ing each tab in an iso­lated “sand­box“, we were able to pre­vent one tab from crash­ing another and pro­vide improved pro­tec­tion from rogue sites. We improved speed and respon­sive­ness across the board. We also built a more pow­er­ful JavaScript vir­tual machine called V8 (hidden class tran­si­tions, auto­matic memory man­age­ment, native com­piled machine code… among others) to power the next gen­er­a­tion of web appli­ca­tions that aren’t even pos­si­ble in today’s browsers. Just like the Google spirit: “launch early and iterate”.

Apple released Safari beta for Win­dows at the WWDC 2007 (Over 1M Safari down­loads in 48 hours). Dave Hyatt is an Amer­i­can soft­ware devel­oper cur­rently employed by Apple Inc. (since July 15, 2002), where he is part of the devel­op­ment team respon­si­ble for the Safari web browser and WebKit frame­work. Hyatt was part of the orig­i­nal team that shipped the beta releases and 1.0 release of Safari. He is cur­rently the Safari and WebKit Archi­tect. Before Apple, Hyatt worked at Netscape Com­mu­ni­ca­tions from 1997 to 2002 where he con­tributed to the Mozilla web browser. While at Netscape, he also cre­ated Camino (then known as Chimera) and co-​created Fire­fox (orig­i­nally called Phoenix) with Blake Ross. He is cred­ited with the ini­tial imple­men­ta­tions of tabbed brows­ing for all three appli­ca­tions. Hyatt also cre­ated and wrote the first spec­i­fi­ca­tions for the XBL and XUL markup lan­guages. So the guy knows what he’s talk­ing about.

Cur­rently the WebKit which is used in many of Apple’s and third party pro­grams. Browser com­peti­tors like Omni­Web and Shiira, but also new pro­grams like Adobe Apollo AIR and the Nokia phone browser use WebKit for view­ing web con­tent. Adobe and Nokia (not the small­est market play­ers) made a choice for the WebKit frame­work instead of the Mozilla frame­work. Why, because WebKit is easier to main­tain, has a smaller code foot­print and ren­ders pages gen­er­ally faster.When Apple released the beta a secu­rity hole was found in the Win­dows version… O, boy did the Micro$oft Win­dows drones snared: “First day it was released and there’s already a secu­rity hole”. Point taken, but it’s BETA people, give Apple your feed­back and ben­e­fit your­self. Tell what you do or don’t like about it. It’s easier to shoot some­thing down, then it’s to think about how to improve it. By the way Apple already released on Friday an update for Safari.In Apple’s End User License Agree­ment it states: IMPOR­TANT NOTE: THIS IS “BETA”, PRE-​RELEASE, TIME-​LIMITED SOFT­WARE MEANT FOR EVAL­U­A­TION AND DEVEL­OP­MENT PUR­POSES ONLY. THIS SOFT­WARE SHOULD NOT BE USED IN A COM­MER­CIAL OPER­AT­ING ENVI­RON­MENT OR WITH IMPOR­TANT DATA. BEFORE INSTALLING THIS APPLE SOFT­WARE, YOU SHOULD BACK UP ALL OF YOUR DATA AND REG­U­LARLY BACK UP DATA WHILE USING THIS APPLE SOFT​WARE.For (Win­dows) web­site devel­op­ers this is a great oppor­tu­nity to start devel­op­ing W3C com­pli­ant and test on Safari, now you don’t need a Mac any­more. Now I can finally throw away Fire­Fox on my PC… that damn resource hoc.