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

Inquisitor is a fantastic search add-on for Safari, and it’s recently been updated to version 3. Basically, it enhances the Safari search box by suggesting results and allowing searches on sites other than Google. Pretty essential, I would say.

Inquisitor

To make it easier to navigate pages using the keyboard, go into Safari Preferences and under the Advanced tab, turn on “Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage”. Now you can use tab to go forward through links and form elements on a page, and shift-tab to go backwards. Follow a highlighted link simply by pressing return.

Okay, so it’s not the full-monty, but for general procrastination purposes it’s mighty fine:

stumbleupon.com/demo/

I use Safari most of the time, but occasionally switch to Firefox for development purposes. There’s always something annoying about Firefox that makes me switch back sharpish. Today’s bugbear: crappy rendering of italic fonts.

Compare and contrast (click to view actual size)

Wikipedia content rendered in Firefox:

Same content rendered in Safari:

Plastic Ono Band - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia