Jobs' Mob hit the headlines a couple of days ago with the claim that its new version of Safari was faster than anything else on the market. The good people at ArsTechnica made the brave move of not taking Apple's word for it and tested Safari 5.

It used a number of JavaScript benchmarks, including the WebKit team's SunSpider, Google's V8 Benchmark, and Mozilla's Dromaeo. They also looked at graphics acceleration performance using Microsoft's HTML5 "Flying Images" speed demo.

It tested Safari on the latest stable versions of Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera on Mac OS X 10.6.3 running on a 3.0GHz, 8-core Mac Pro with 10GB RAM and two ATI Radeon 2600XT GPUs. The tests were also run on Windows 7 on a 2.67 GHz Core 2 Duo PC with 4 GB of RAM and an ATI 4830 GPU.

Superficially the tests seemed to back Apple's claim that it was the fastest browser in the west. However Safari didn't fare so well. Chrome was nearly twice as fast as Safari running the V8 Benchmark suite, which attempts to simulate the kind of code that large-scale, next-generation Web apps would use.

Apple's claims on GPU acceleration did not hold water either. Safari tied for dead last place on this test with Chrome which has done nothing to improve GPU acceleration. Firefox was far faster at 12fps, and Opera was far faster yet again with 28fps. Given Apple's promotion of newer Web standards for animation, the fact that this demo runs 6 times slower on Mac OS X on much more capable hardware has to be embarrassing.

Ars said that although Safari 5 is quite snappy, in comparison to Safari 4 on Windows. The benchmarks we ran show that that things could be a lot better.