[boca]

Actually it's not a browser, it a rendering engine. This is the core of what you build browsers around, just add fluff and eye candy, perhaps a few bells and whistles, and you have a browser. And be careful talking about how fast things are - it's much more complicated than that.

First of all, rendering time for a certain type of document or web application is the most important component of the "speed" aspect in a browser. But there are others not related to rendering the page. Secondly since webkit can't be measured standalone, you need to measure things using browsers that use the engine which skews the results. Finally speed on the web is not just one linear measurement.

Webkit happens to have the most complete implementation AND the fastest CSS logic anywhere. This is the most important consideration these days when it comes to how fast can you interpret the document and code and draw the page. They are state of the art. But I think the jury is still out on other things. In particular, the strength of firefox has always been that the guys who invented javascript (and are now destroying it via version 2 specs) work at Mozilla. Despite the great increase in bugs lately, the core code they used in version 2 and are using in v3 are really the best javascript interpreters out there. That used to mean nothing in terms of speed, but these days many Ajax apps are nothing more than an HTML shell, some small amount of CSS and a boatload of javascript that fills in the page with content and continues working after the initial loading. It has more impact on speed in the case of apps like gmail than anything else.

So who's the fastest? Absolutely depends on what kind of site you're loading.