waffle

Safari 3.1 just got out of beta and is quite literally over twice as fast. Using SunSpider, the JavaScript benchmark backed by the WebKit team (as it contains “real code”, is varied and does statistical analysis), the Safari 3.0.4 build that came with my computer — 5523.15 — clocked up 8821.4ms +/- 0.4%, and 3.1 clocked up 3132.0ms +/- 0.7%. It’s also got CSS web fonts, local SQL storage, support for the HTML5 <audio>/<video> elements, better SVG support and CSS transforms and animation (contrary to everything else in that list, a made-up extension, which is in fairness how <canvas> got started).

Firefox 3 has been shaping up to be awesome for a few months, starting with the wonderful URL completion (sorted by “frecency”) and continuing with rendering improvements and recently a gigantic push to keep memory usage down.

Even the Internet Explorer 8 beta is looking good these days with better support for new standards or good support for old standards (cough). Joel Spolsky notably pissed on progressive, uh, “idealistic” web developers in the name of actual users recently, completely managing to ignore or at least downplay the fact that Microsoft put itself in their merry bed by allowing IE 6 to a) track IE 5’s broken implementation of the box model by default, b) suck and c) stagnate horribly. We can either keep playing this fucking game a few more years until people do switch from IE to other browsers or IE can aspire to approach a decent modern web browser again.

Joel’s right that there’s precisely no middle ground, but also seems to think that the IE team will go wrong in picking the side that will bring us back on track again and won’t go wrong by aiming towards yesterday’s situation; as if leaning back and thinking of England would undo the progress that has been made. IE7 mode being available is great, but IE7 mode being the default is just a wonderful way to set a horrible precedent (how many of you would be willing to update all of your sites at least twice this year; one to say “yes, I will support IE8″ and “yes, I will support Firefox 3″, notwithstanding any upcoming major Safari or Opera upgrade?) and hold back any sort of effort to get us out of this situation. It’s going to be a painful transition for some IE users, and it would have been way less painful if Microsoft had played their cards right and did the right thing years ago.

(Mark Pilgrim said it later, but better.)

And in case you missed it, I’d like to welcome our friend the Browser Wars back again. It’s a good time to be alive and browsing.