Ars Technica posted a review on Safari 5
Apple released the latest major version of its web browser, Safari 5, earlier this week. Along with several new features—one of them somewhat controversial—the update was said to pack a number of performance improvements, including DNS pre-fetching and optimizations to Safari's Nitro JavaScript engine. "Safari continues to lead the pack in performance," Apple SVP of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, said in a statement. We decided to put those claims to the test, pitting Safari against leading browsers on both Mac OS X and Windows 7.Safari 5 tested: Chrome, Opera still have JavaScript edge
Included in our tests are a number of JavaScript benchmarks, including the WebKit team's SunSpider, Google's V8 Benchmark, and Mozilla's Dromaeo. We also took a look at graphics acceleration performance using Microsoft's HTML5 "Flying Images" speed demo. The tests were run on the latest stable versions of Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera on Mac OS X 10.6.3 running on a 3.0GHz, 8-core Mac Pro with 10GB RAM and two ATI Radeon 2600XT GPUs. The tests were also run on Windows 7 on a 2.67 GHz Core 2 Duo PC with 4 GB of RAM and an ATI 4830 GPU. On our Windows 7 rig we had a recent development build of Chrome (as opposed to the latest stable version), and we also ran the tests using IE8 and a developer preview of IE9.
