Safari in iOS 7 has better performance than iOS 6

As the new Apple iOS 7 has been finally released, I have upgraded an iPad 2 and compared the performance of Safari Mobile browser in iOS 7 to iOS 6. The benchmark results show that iOS 7 has better performance in web browsing and better compliance to web standards. Have a look at the comparison table:

Browser	Browsermark	Octane Benchmark	HTML5 Test	CSS3 Test
Safari / iOS7	2288	1479	399 + 9	61%
Safari / iOS6	2022	935	386 + 9	59%
Improvement	13%	58%	3%	2%

For more information about Safari Mobile in iOS 7, read this excellent article on Breaking the Mobile Web.

How to update Safari for Windows to the latest version of WebKit

If you are still using Safari 5.1 for Windows (e.g. for the excellent font smoothing), you can keep up with modern web browsers by upgrading its WebKit engine to the latest version released by Apple. Just follow these steps:

1. If you have iTunes already installed, go to step 5.
2. Download the latest release of iTunes for Windows.
3. Open the downloaded file iTunesSetup.exe in an archive manager, like 7-Zip or WinRAR.
4. Extract the file AppleApplicationSupport.msi and run it. Complete the installation.
5. Copy the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Apple\Apple Application Support (or without (x86) when on 32-bit system) to C:\Program Files (x86)\Safari and merge with the existing Apple Application Support folder.

When you restart Safari, you will notice much better HTML5 & CSS3 support (319 -> 342 points in HTML5 Test) and JavaScript performance. Enjoy!