The WebKit guys have put together a new Javascript benchmark under the name “SunSpider“. It’s intended to go further than simple benchmarks like Celtic Kane’s and try to emulate real-world tasks. Safari/WebKit has been getting pretty quick on these benchmarks anyway, but this new one really shows its strengths. There are various comments about people’s results in the comments for that post, but no compilation for easy comparison, so I’ve put one together.
Updated: added Webkit Win and Opera 9.5b Win
Updated: Failed to run completely on Opera 9.5b Mac
Updated: Some stats for Opera 9.5b Mac and IE6
Updated March 18th: Added Safari 3.1, FF3b4, IE8
Safari & CSS User Interface colours
I’ve recently encountered a stylesheet that uses the CSS user Interface colours defined here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/ui.html
My attention was drawn to it because it was a problem. a:hover was defined as color:HighlightText, and body had background-color:Background, the result of which was that I got white text on a white background when rolling over links. This makes it sound like these values are not set properly by Safari, or that it doesn’t match Safari’s own internal style sheet. For example if I select text on a page with neither of these styles set (i.e. black text on white), I get my system selected background colour, but the text remains black. This would indicate that Safari considers HighlightText to be black by default. But when I ask for that colour by name, I get white instead. Is this a bug?