My inner dork noted that the folks at the WebKit project have recently released a new development build that includes a new JavaScript engine called SquirrelFish. WebKit is the browser toolkit that powers Apple’s Safari and MobileSafari on the iPhone. It is also embedded into a smattering of mobile browsers offered by others, including Nokia and Google’s Android mobile OS. I’ve written about WebKit before, most notably my report The Web 2.0 Security Train Wreck.

Now, my computer science self could try and prattle on about what the WebKit team says the new JavaScript engine does better than the old one, or about the advantages of bytecode engines over  syntax tree walkers, and so forth. I could do that, but the article does that pretty well already. The most important things to take away are these:

•  It’s fast. How fast, you ask? 1.6x as fast as the current Safari 3.1.1 implementation. Faster than Firefox 3 and Opera too, if you believe these performance numbers.
• It probably uses less memory. Because speed is usually a function of the complexity of data structures in memory, faster execution probably means less memory consumption also. 

There’s a reason I mention all this. WebKit powers the iPhone, a memory-and-processor bound device. Anything that can speed up MobileSafari is good. If these numbers hold up, I think we can reasonably expect that browsing on the iPhone — which is already pretty terrific — is about to get a lot smoother and more responsive. It won’t be just Apple that benefits, either. The browsing experience on Android and certain Nokia and Samsung devices will improve a lot too.

The last point I’d make is that it’s clear that lever of browser innovation has tipped in favor of open source implementations and away from Microsoft. The WebKit project, Mozilla, and Opera, for example, have been engaging in a friendly competition to pass the Acid3 web standards test. All three of these are continually one-upping each other to be more standards-compliant than the others. This kind of virtuous, friendly competition is terrific for the web, and even better for the mobile web.