Apple is the opposite of modesty and in some cases, rightfully so. But in other cases, the company’s claims do not support reality and its modesty may expose the company with its pants down. In case of its latest Safari browser, the statement that Safari 5 is the world’s fastest browser is a flat out lie. A lie that is completely unnecessary.

Let’s be realistic, if you are claiming that you are offering the world’s fastest browser, you are inviting people to check whether you are blowing smoke or if you in fact do have a truly fast browser. And if Apple says Safari 5 (5.33.16.0) is the world’s fastest browser I was eager to see whether the browser would be able to match the “lightning speed” claim as well as Google’s potato gun-like Chrome 5 performance.

There are many ways to determine browser speed and there is no way to be entirely fair. Virtually any benchmark is skewed to one or the other performance discipline. IE9 PP2, for example, does extremely well in HTML5 graphics hardware acceleration. Like the other major Webkit browser Chrome, Safari does poorly, despite Steve Jobs’ claims that Apple is now all about HTML 5. It’s not entirely Apple’s fault. It just looks bad.

The most appropriate way to get an idea of Safari’s performance potential is the generally accepted Webkit Sunspider test. It’s quoted by Microsoft. Safari and Chrome are based on Webkit. But it’s not particularly a benchmark that is quoted by Mozilla. You can’t make everybody happy. Here are the results I got earlier today.

Lower scores are better. The shown results are averages of 3 test runs for each browser on a quad-core Intel PC. Safari is among the fastest browsers, but even if we apply the error margin of about 3% in the most favorable way to Safari, Apple’s browser is not the fastest browser in this comparison and its good enough for me to raise doubt  that Apple may be hoping to get away with a false statement.  There may be benchmarks in which Safari trumps every other browser, but it certainly does not in this case. With a reasonable margin of error taken in consideration, it is about on one level with Opera 10.53, but it is substantially behind the shipping version of Chrome as well as the developer version Chrome 6 Dev.

If you run the benchmark on your PC/Mac you are more than likely to receive results that are very different, based on the hardware in your computer. If you see Safari in this discipline ahead of Chrome, simply post your result in the comments below, but I have doubts at this time that actual benchmark results can support Apple’s claim, which is a bit beyond my comfort level. However, this claim may actually be a bit of an oversight, as the entire Safari website still has many references to Safari 4. So the claim of being the “world’s fastest browser” may still be left over from the Safari 4 launch. It’s time to take it down, Apple.

It’s sad to catch Apple with its pants down, because Safari 5 is a great browser, even if its not the fastest. It follows Google’s lead with a much cleaner interface and a few nice features that make browsing more interesting on a PC and a delight on a Mac, as Safari tightly integrates with the overall experience of other Apple devices. There’s a history feature that shows your visited web pages in Cover Flow. There is a Reader button that renders a website into a new page without web content. Web publishers and advertisers may not like this feature as it removes advertising (and some other graphical elements), but it’s a nice addition for the user, if displayed ads bother you.  Even if the new Safari 5 feels like a Google Chrome version that simply has been fine tuned for use on Apple computers, it has its own unique appeal and feature set.

But stating that it is the world’s fastest browser is false. Period.

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