Apple announced yesterday that they would improve Safari’s performance in Mac OS X 10.6. Today Apple started seeding developers with a very early beta version of Safari 4 (5526.11.2). According to Apple the biggest improvement in Safari will be faster implementation of JavaScript, increasing the performance by 53 percent. The improvement will make Web 2.0 applications like upcoming MobileMe, faster and more responsive. It is believed that Apple will use the SquirrelFish technology, it is a new and improved JavaScript interpreter that is under development for Webkit. SquirrelFish almost doubles the performance of Safari for JavaScript.
The other new feature found in Safari 4 is the ability to save webpages as stand alone web application. These web applications are basically Site Specific Browsers that function as separate Cocoa desktop application giving you Dock icon, standard menu bar and separation from other web browsing activities. Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” will be released in about a year, but the speed with which Apple has released Safari 4 Beta to developers, we might even see a public release of Safari 4 before OS X 10.6 is released to public.
[Via MacRumors]