For those who don’t know, WebKit is the open-source version of Apple’s own Safari. Granted, Apple does tack on plenty of useful features that you can’t get in WebKit, but the main performance improvements happen here.

There was buzz during WWDC ‘08 about Safari 4’s 1.61x Javascript performance improvement over Safari 3.1. Even more, it is 4.34x as fast compared to Safari 3.0. That’s very impressive improvements, placing Safari and WebKit out ahead of even the latest version of Firefox, version 3, released just today. Well, if you would like that performance boost today while running Javascript intensive sites, then download the latest nightly build from the WebKit site and have fun!

WebKit Open-Source Project