So I downloaded yesterday the latest Software Update for Mac OSX and it included an update of the Safari Web Browser, which I had taken for dead ages ago, I’m a hardcore Firefox user.

Today I read about the new updates, and I read something that caught my eye at Mackinando.com.

it executes JavaScript six times faster than the rest

I go to the Safari Site, and they compare themselves with a previous version, Firefox, and Opera (not IE, not even worth mentioning)

I couldn’t believe my eyes, so I googled for “JavaScript Benchmark“, and tried the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark onboth Firefox 2.0.0.12 and the shiny new Safari 3.1.

The machine used for this test is a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Version 10.4.11 with a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM.

Here are the results side by side:

FIREFOX 2.0.0.12
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 15365.4ms +/- 1.7%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   2386.6ms +/- 7.9%
    cube:                733.0ms +/- 20.8%
    morph:              1269.8ms +/- 9.4%
    raytrace:            383.8ms +/- 37.1%

  access:               1386.2ms +/- 4.8%
    binary-trees:        201.6ms +/- 0.6%
    fannkuch:            294.8ms +/- 5.4%
    nbody:               691.2ms +/- 8.9%
    nsieve:              198.6ms +/- 1.5%

  bitops:               3461.2ms +/- 0.4%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   275.8ms +/- 0.6%
    bits-in-byte:        248.2ms +/- 0.7%
    bitwise-and:        2765.2ms +/- 0.5%
    nsieve-bits:         172.0ms +/- 4.7%

  controlflow:           153.4ms +/- 0.7%
    recursive:           153.4ms +/- 0.7%

  crypto:                527.2ms +/- 0.5%
    aes:                 230.8ms +/- 1.2%
    md5:                 147.4ms +/- 0.5%
    sha1:                149.0ms +/- 0.6%

  date:                 2551.8ms +/- 0.3%
    format-tofte:       1449.6ms +/- 0.3%
    format-xparb:       1102.2ms +/- 0.8%

  math:                 1312.6ms +/- 12.8%
    cordic:              497.4ms +/- 12.0%
    partial-sums:        501.6ms +/- 1.6%
    spectral-norm:       313.6ms +/- 36.1%

  regexp:                501.0ms +/- 0.2%
    dna:                 501.0ms +/- 0.2%

  string:               3085.4ms +/- 10.3%
    base64:              914.6ms +/- 3.4%
    fasta:               676.0ms +/- 35.4%
    tagcloud:            441.4ms +/- 0.6%
    unpack-code:         846.8ms +/- 25.4%
    validate-input:      206.6ms +/- 1.1%

SAFARI 3.1
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 3368.8ms +/- 1.0%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   414.8ms +/- 1.9%
    cube:               132.2ms +/- 2.4%
    morph:              144.6ms +/- 4.1%
    raytrace:           138.0ms +/- 0.6%

  access:               520.4ms +/- 4.1%
    binary-trees:        78.6ms +/- 11.3%
    fannkuch:           231.4ms +/- 2.0%
    nbody:              149.2ms +/- 8.1%
    nsieve:              61.2ms +/- 3.9%

  bitops:               449.6ms +/- 2.4%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   69.8ms +/- 9.6%
    bits-in-byte:        99.2ms +/- 4.6%
    bitwise-and:        167.2ms +/- 2.3%
    nsieve-bits:        113.4ms +/- 6.7%

  controlflow:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%
    recursive:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%

  crypto:               247.2ms +/- 2.3%
    aes:                 81.2ms +/- 2.5%
    md5:                 83.8ms +/- 4.6%
    sha1:                82.2ms +/- 2.0%

  date:                 306.4ms +/- 0.5%
    format-tofte:       146.6ms +/- 1.4%
    format-xparb:       159.8ms +/- 1.0%

  math:                 454.8ms +/- 1.3%
    cordic:             174.4ms +/- 1.6%
    partial-sums:       193.8ms +/- 1.2%
    spectral-norm:       86.6ms +/- 4.4%

  regexp:               209.6ms +/- 0.7%
    dna:                209.6ms +/- 0.7%

  string:               674.8ms +/- 2.2%
    base64:             103.8ms +/- 9.0%
    fasta:              177.0ms +/- 1.0%
    tagcloud:           136.0ms +/- 4.6%
    unpack-code:        136.0ms +/- 1.7%
    validate-input:     122.0ms +/- 2.6%

Comparing with Firefox, the overall result of this test was that it’s 4.56 times faster.

However, if we look test by test, there are areas where I feel embarrassed for Firefox.

Bitwise Operations
For example, Bit-Operation tests in Safari 3.1 are 7.7 times faster in Safari, being the case of the bitwise-AND (&) operator the worst of them, Safari performed bitwise-and’s 16 times faster than Firefox

OUCH!!

String Operations
So you’d be curious now about String operations, which is probably a lot of what goes on with Javascript, and Ajax, parsing those XML results and what not, maybe the bitwise & won’t hurt us that much given that not many programmers today are smart enough to use them for web programming.

When it comes to String operations, Safari 3.1 was 4.5 times faster than Firefox 2.

Kudos to the Safari Team, I thought there was no point in having Safari until I did this benchmark. I guess they don’t want to let go of Web Browser users, maybe they make millions every month with ad-clicks on Google generated with the search field they have at the top of the browser which is set by default to do Google search.

Once again the saying proves it self

“Competition is good”

Let’s hope this will make the Firefox team think more on Javascript improvements with the upcoming Firefox 3. Once it’s release ready, it’ll be worth it running this benchmark again and see where it stands.

Update (March 20th, 2008)

I’ve made tests on Firefox 3 beta 4, You can see the results here. Tests have been made again on the same Macbook Pro. The improvements of Firefox 3 are notable, however, on the mac, Safari still wins.

This week I was interviewed to talk about MyBloop.com by one of the most famous podcasters of the Hispanic Podcastphere, Minelia Manriquez, a.k.a. La Tati.

I was invited to her show Variedades en Red to talk about the past, present and future of MyBloop.com as well as the new Blooploader.

If you are a Spanish speaker you should not miss the episode, great music, other good geek interviews about iPhone hacking, and of course you might hear a few surprises that may come out soon to MyBloop.com

Variedades en Red is a weekly hispanic podcast that’s aired in several web radio stations reaching crowds anywhere from Argentina, to the US, to Spain and all of latin america.

Some of the radio stations that broadcast this show are:

• OidoEnRadio.com
• EnLaRed.com.ve
• SuperMusica.com.ve

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

FrostWire 4.13.5 is now available for MS Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Major updates improve network bootstraping and peer discovery. 4.13.5 includes improvements on the Chatroom tab, Audio Previews and more.

Other improvements have taken place for the FrostWire build process (for developers this means true One-Step builds for all versions). Updates on translations have been made thanks to the feedback from users in Poland and throughout Latin America. .

In more detail users can expect the following:

• Faster peer discovery on connection bootstraping. No more “Starting Connection…” problems, first time users will connect faster without using the official FixConnecting.zip patch.

• Smiley Support to the chatroom

Users can see the available smileys by entering the command
/smileys

Now its possible to see and use Smileys from the Community Chat tab, Smiley display can be enabled or disabled from the view menu:

Users can also toggle Smiley display directly from the chat window by typing the command
/tsmileys

• Fixed wording on Spanish and Polish translations.

Bug Fixes and other improvements for this release also include:

• FrostWire Message Update System improved. Per community request, some announcements will not be shown more than once so the user is not annoyed upon every application launch
• Fixed bugs on the media player and playlists on Preview.
• Fixed bug on search box auto-focusing while a search was running.
• Fixed i18n system error for systems which default language is not english
• Potential bugs related to deprecated code gone

Users can find now by details without the auto-focusing problem.

FrostWire 4.13.5 is expected to be the last of the 4.13.x series.

About FrostWire

FrostWire, a Gnutella Peer-to-Peer client, is a collaborative effort from many Open Source and freelance developers located from all around the world. In late 2005, concerned developers of LimeWire’s open source community announced the start of a new project fork “FrostWire” that would protect the developmental source code of the LimeWire client and any improvements to the Gnutella protocol design. The developers of FrostWire give high regard and respect to the GNU General Public License and consider it to be the ideal foundation of a creative and free enterprise market.

• Media Kit / Link Us
• Contact the Team

This feels like graduating or something similar. I can’t believe our grassroot effort after about a year of work has gone so far, far enough to make it to the Top 20 most popular software on download.com

I guess I can only thank all the users and all the people that have helped spread the word, since this is probably like 95% the work of word of mouth. Thanks, we can only feel like releasing more and more FrostWire versions for you in the near future to see if we can get on the top 10 now.

Last week my wife told me if I knew an easy way (without using the cmd.exe) on Windows to list the contents of a directory, she basically wanted to give her users a one click solution to list the contents of a folder and have them on notepad.

So, I created a solution in python, compiled it with p2exe and by executing a .reg file, it gets bound to your right click context menu on Windows.

You can download the zip file here
Instructions are included (where to unzip, etc) , and source code is included as well.

We found way more advanced solutions for this, but they were non-free versions, or shareware versions that would expire.
This only took about an hour to create, so you can use this all you want, note that it will only list the names of the files, each on one line, and folders will look like [this].

Customizing, Building

If you want to add more information about the file, you’ll have to hack it, you have the source code inside the .zip file, it’s python so its pretty easy, all you’ll need to build it is, python2.5, py2exe, and then you just execute that setup.py script, I believe like this

python setup.py py2eye

and it will create a new binary version for you on a dist/ folder.

DO NOT BUY THIS SOFTWARE ITS FREE SOFTWARE