Apple Said To Accelerate Safari’s Javascript Engine

Apple’s Safari web browser is considered one of the most popular Windows and Mac browsers that millions of people are using it. Nitro, WebKit’s JavaScript interpreter used in Apple’s Safari, is about to get a lot speedier as Apple is seemingly looking to close a speed gap between its browser and both Google Chrome’s V8 and Mozilla Firefox’s SpiderMonkey engines.

Today and according to a new report from MacRumors alone the side of InfoWorld explaining that Apple’s work on boosting JavaScript performance in Safari stems from the inclusion of so-called accelerator upgrades in recent builds of WebKit, a web rendering engine Apple developed and later open-sourced to the public.

Specifically, Apple is toying with so-called FTLJIT upgrades to WebKit’s Nitro JavaScript interpreter, also known as JavaScriptCore.

InfoWorld explains:

FTLJIT is still considered experimental, so although it’s being made available in the OS X port of WebKit by default, it’s not actually turned on yet – it has to be enabled through command-line flags.

The AreWeFastYet JavaScript benchmarking website has found FTLJIT markedly faster than Chrome on 64-bit OS X, although Firefox running asm.js versions of the same benchmarks “still consistently beat WebKit”.

One attribute that could make FTLJIT stand out from the pack all the more is how well it runs JavaScript code that is not specifically optimized for [Mozilla’s] asm.js.

Every JavaScript engine will run asm.js code, but only Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey honors asm.js-specific optimizations, and right now no other browser maker has elected to follow Mozilla’s lead.

As FTLJIT is currently being prototyped, there was no word on when the technology might ship in the consumer version of Safari. Perhaps FTLJIT will make its way into OS X 10.10 and iOS 8?