Coming soon after the announcement of Google’s new Chrome browser and its V8 JavaScript engine, the WebKit project has now released details of SquirrelFish Extreme. An update to the never officially released SquirrelFish engine, the benchmarks against Safari 3.1 certainly look impressive. Other benchmarks also show it outperforming both V8 and Firefox 3.1’s TraceMonkey engine.

SquirrelFish Extreme uses four different technologies to deliver much better performance than the original SquirrelFish: bytecode optimizations, polymorphic inline caching, a lightweight “context threaded” JIT compiler, and a new regular expression engine that uses our JIT infrastructure.

Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » Introducing SquirrelFish Extreme

Google have announced news of Chrome, a new open source Webkit-based browser. The central premise is that it has been designed from the ground-up to work efficiently with the demanding web applications of today’s web. In particular, it features a JavaScript engine called V8 which can utilise multiple processes, as opposed to the single-process engines that power Firefox and Safari.

As Google are emphasising performance, it will be interesting to compare their efforts with Safari’s new SquirrelFish JavaScript engine.

Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project