Safari 3 for Windows slower than Firefox & IE7?

The recent Apple WWDC 2007 had Steve Jobs introducing the 3rd version of Apple’s Safari browser to be available on Windows PC. The Public Beta release can be downloaded here. A quick demo and benchmarking on stage showed Safari to be far more superior than any other major browsers out there, including Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. His charts shows as much:

Wired news did their own benchmarking and found out something different. Their results showed that Safari for Windows is still slower than Firefox and IE7.

I did my own crude testing by timing a fully loaded Netvibes account:

IE7 - 19.28 secs
Safari - 13.7 secs
Flock - 15.72 secs
Firefox 2 - 15.45 secs
Opera 9 - 12.93 secs

Testing was done 5 times for each browser, eliminating the highest and lowest recorded load times and taking the average of the remaining figures. Opera 9 emerged the fastest of them all, followed by Safari 3 with IE7 being the slowest.

I also tested Javascript Speed Test using this tool and got the ff. averages:

IE7 - 2,047 ms
Safari - 344 ms
Flock - 2,281 ms
Firefox 2 - 1,063 ms
Opera 9 - 1,625 ms

This time, Safari led the pack way ahead at less than half a second total load time while Flock is at last place with 2.2secs. From the looks of it, Safari seems to be a good contender for the top spot. And the 3rd version is still just a Public Beta.

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