Pet Pixels

Zoë and I sailed from Gibraltar to Almerimar with my Mum this weekend. I use "sailed" a little loosely as there was essentially no wind, so we motored nearly all the way. Zoë had a fantastic time. The weather was lovely, and with so little wind, it was really easy to stop for a swim every so often (like when the water temperature sensor said 27°!). The highlight for me was sitting down for dinner in the setting sun and being joined by 40 or so dolphins. Highly recommended!

I just grabbed the new update to the Safari 4 preview, and I have to say it's very zippy indeed. I ran SunSpider benchmarks on it and FireFox 3.0.1 on my Mac Pro. Safari 4 is on average 75% faster, but has many results that are in the 200 - 500% range.

This is only measuring javascript performance of course, but that, plus whatever other changes are in S4, translates to incredible speed in daily use. I use the SafariStand extension to remember my open tabs, and I can reopen about 40 tabs in 8 windows in about 3 seconds, including all their content! FF 3 was a huge improvement over 2, but Safari 4 is a different league. This is only a preview, so it will probably get faster still by release.

The integration of the JS debugger is very elegant (Drosera has been rolled in), but I'm still looking forward to the appearance of FireBug for Safari, which someone is doing as a Google SoC project (S4 adds some FireBug hooks too).

All the new CSS funkiness from recent webkit nightlies is there too, and I suspect many an iPhone and widget developer is drooling over them...