There is some news bubbling about Firefox and Safari duking it out on performance enhancement and quickening the pace of Javascript interpretation. Apple claims that Safari has significant performance increases.
Safari 4 has just been seeded to the developers at Apple's developer conference. The manufacturer claims that the software has a 53% faster JavaScript engine than the preceding and current version 3.1 (based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test conducted on iMac with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at 2.8 GHz, with 2 GB of RAM and running under Mac OS X Snow Leopard.) Although Firefox 3 RC3 was the first to deliver significant JavaScript performance improvement, Apple apparently is exceeding those gains with Safari 4.
As always, Microsoft manages to do exactly what is expected of them, and provide another piece of bloated software. According to the TG Daily article, the responsiveness of Internet Explorer 8 is slower than that of Internet Explorer 7. This is a huge step backwards as most people are still going to continue using the browser bundled with their operating system. And again, the Microsoft engineers are still incapable of making a product that both functions the way developers want it to function, and perform in a way the user experience is enhanced. If Internet Explorer is unable to keep up with the rapid rate of growth displayed by Firefox and Opera (my two favorite browsers), their market share will slowly decrease until a majority stop using Internet Explorer.
Gladly however, this only means the amount of simultaneous Javascript is limited to that of which allows the user to continue navigating the page with ease. Unlike previous internet Explorer releases, Internet Explorer 8 claims to fix many of the display issues particularly when dealing with unsupported CSS, or incorrectly coded pages. The only fear I have of Internet Explorer 8 is the introduction of more bugs that create further complications when coding and generating valid XHTML documents that do not display properly in the invalid browser.