Safari 4 rivals Google Chrome in JavaScript race

From InfoWorld: Contrary to Apple's claims, the newest version of Safari is not the world's fastest browser, benchmark scores show. But it is dramatically faster than rivals being built by Mozilla and Microsoft.

According to JavaScript rendering tests run by Computerworld, the public beta of Safari 4 is in a virtual dead heat with the most recent edition of Google's Chrome, but is 38 percent faster than the newest version of Firefox, more than three times faster than the production edition of that open-source browser, and over five times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8.

Computerworld ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite in Windows XP three times for each browser, then averaged the scores.

Safari 4, which Apple released Tuesday as a public beta , scored just slightly higher than Chrome 2.0.164.0, a developer-only build of Google's browser that was issued only last week. The difference, however, was minute: Google was only about 7 percent faster. Although Chrome and Safari are both built around the same open-source WebKit engine, they use different JavaScript engines. The former features Google's own V8 engine, while Safari 4 relies on Apple's new Nitro.

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