5.6 webkit speeds vs. current Safari 3 beta
 

Hello, I tested 5.5.4 some while back and was extremely close to purchasing until the Safari 3 beta was released and the speed increase was drastic in my opinion over the webkit build that version 5.5.4 was using. With the new 5.6 sneaky peak, can anyone offer any insight as to the rendering engine in comparison to that of the current Safari 3 beta available? I'm basically looking for speed / stability comparisons. I do understand 5.6 is still an early alpha, but omni products always seem to be usable in their early stages thus far. Thanks, looking forward to some good responses.

After having my second crash, I would say that stability is not quite there, but it's enough to merit day to day use. On my old laptop, I would say that Safari 3 and OW 5.6 are neck and neck in speed. I am inclined to say that OW is faster.

Payam

I to am using 5.6 SP , I've trashed 5.5.4. Still a few issue and infrequent crashes here. Tho i browse with plugins & Java disabled and have some heavy add filtering in my custom style sheet. This really is THE best browser on any platform for my style. I still lust after 3 main features which hopefully ill be added in the future, until then i don't quite have browser bliss, getting closer however.

Safari 3 hangs terribly on a number of sites (e.g. Yahoo), so its definitely not ready for prime-time. A shame, because its find-as-you type functionality is great (where is this for OW??), as well as little niceties like re-sizeable text fields. Based on qualitative, subjective information so far, I lean toward OW being both faster and more stable at the moment.

As a followup, I notice now that after having both browsers open for awhile, OW is using 180MB of real memory and almost 500MB(!) of virtual memory. That is pretty unacceptable. Safari is at 50MB and 240MB, respectively.

wow @ the memory consumption. I surely hope this is a leak and not by design, I can't ever remember 5.5.4 consuming that much. Can anyone comment on the actual Webkit versions being used between the two?

And for the love of god Omni, I'll buy multiple copies (for no appearant reason) if you just implement some find as you type :(

Otherwise, looks like I'll be giving 5.6 a go anyways sometime soon, I'll report back with my impressions.

5.5.4 is leaking like crazy.
You can see for your self.

1. Change your homepage to: about:blank
2. Open Activity Monitor or 'top'
3. Open 30, 40, 50 new tabs (just press cmd+t) and you'll see that OW can easily take 300-500MB of real memory - with just blank pages.

Do the same with Safari2, Camino, Firefox or a Nightly Webkit release and you won't see such high memory usage - Webkit/Safari aren't affected by this test, as memory nearly rises.

I was emailing with OW 4-5 months ago to help them find the bug and they said they know there are leaks and working on a fix - but the same issue is with 5.6

Idan

[QUOTE=idanmashaal]5.5.4 is leaking like crazy.
You can see for your self.

1. Change your homepage to: about:blank
2. Open Activity Monitor or 'top'
3. Open 30, 40, 50 new tabs (just press cmd+t) and you'll see that OW can easily take 300-500MB of real memory - with just blank pages.[/QUOTE]

I just tried this, and I'm not seeing that at all: I just opened 32 about:blank tabs in another window (with this window still open), and my real memory usage is at 161MB. I opened another 32 blank tabs for a total of 64 blank tabs, and my memory usage is 227MB. (This works out to about 1.03MB per tab, which is pretty great for a whole web browser context—especially when you consider that each full-size render image for a tab's thumbnail is somewhere around a megabyte.)

I closed those 64 tabs and my real memory dropped back to 106MB, then opened another 32 tabs and my memory went back up to 169MB. Closed those 32 tabs and I'm back down to 106MB, opened 32 again and I'm back up to 169MB again.

In other words, I'm not seeing a memory leak at all: I set a new high water mark after going up to 64 tabs and back, but then usage stayed consistent. If you're seeing a leak, however, we'd definitely like to figure out what we're doing differently so we can track down the problem and fix it!

(By the way, I was testing this in 5.6, but I also tested in 5.5.4 and got similar results: 5.5.4 used 6MB more memory, nowhere near the hundreds you were seeing.)

Hi Ken,

Keep pressing cmd+t and you'll see your maxing.
I use OW as my main broser and I'm hooked.
I noticed that if I browse for a day or two and then exit the app - my usage memory is still high.

I have an iMac Core Duo with 2GB or ram.
I'll add a screenshot - I went a bit extreme in the picture.

Remember - Webkit/Safari doesn't have this problem.
I checked it also on another installation I have of OSX (on an external drive) and same results --- it's a clean updated install except for OW.

Here is the link: [url]http://www.box.net/shared/static/62jlislhuv.png[/url]

Idan.

hehe thats one full bookmarks bar!