The fine folks at WebKit did something special. TraceMonkey from Mozilla and V8 from Google could have given them a mental beating, but it seems they used this to set aflame their own desire to make the fastest JavaScript engine.

With SquirrelFish out first in the WebKit nightlies several months ago, it seemed like a race was started by the coders at Apple (and friends) to get much richer and necessarily faster web applications powered by JavaScript. The Mozillians joined the race first, by bring TraceMonkey to the Firefox 3.1 nightlies, and claiming the crown in most, if not all, areas. Then came the newcomer, Google, who used part of WebKit for rendering, but plugged in their own JavaScript engine, V8. Although V8 wasn't a clear winner, it did beat all exciting browsers and was in fair competition with TraceMonkey. But now the WebKit team proves you can't ignore them... meet the extreme.

SquirrelFish Extreme is the new JavaScript engine for WebKit and continues where SquirrelFish started. There are now four key components which are responsible for it's speed: bytecode optimizations, polymorphic inline cache, context threaded JIT and regular expression JIT.

So it sounds all technical ey, but how much faster is faster? At the Summer of JavaScriptCore benchmarks appeared using SunSpider and the results are staggering. SquirrelFish Extreme clocks in at 943 ms, Google Chrome's V8 at 1280 ms, Mozilla Firefox 3.1's TraceMonkey at 1464 ms and lastly Opera at 6394 ms.

Well, these numbers show great potential in these three browsers, surely Google must be scratching their head performance wise, though V8 is also specifically tasked for multi-processing. Nonetheless it's a good thing we have competition between these big (small) three, as you can already see they all improve.

However one can only be disappointed that the browser so often touted as the fastest is the slowest, as there are no numbers of Internet Explorer 8.