Welcome to the Charcoal Design Weblog
Home to the random musings of our editor, plus aggregated Charcoal Design news and articles.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are those of the author and are not endorsed by Charcoal Design unless specifically stated.
Subscribe to weblog feed:
Posted at 10:49am on 03 Jun 2008
SquirrelFish
Apparently not content with having the fastest JavaScript engine on the market, the Safari/Webkit developers have just announced Squirrelfish, the improbably-named new JS engine for Webkit that is more than half-again as fast as the version included in Safari 3.1.
This speed bump is signficant not just for Mac users and the ~3 users of Safari on Windows, but for mobile Internet users, where Webkit is rapidly becoming the dominant browser platform. On mobile devices, where processors are slow (Safari on the iPhone, one of the most powerful handheld Web-capable devices, was benchmarked as being 100x slower than its desktop cousin) this speed boost could mean that a whole generation of "Web 2.0" sites now become usable on today's hardware.
Apart from being great news for web developers and users, the article includes a facinating discussion of the engineering process for virtual machines and bytecode interpreters.
Permalink
Posted at 10:43am on 03 Jun 2008
iPlayer Downloader
Handy open source program for downloading DRM-free content from the BBC's iPlayer service (Mac OS X only):
Permalink