Apple has just released desktop Safari for Mac and Windows to 4.0.4, which improves full history search performance, has the mandatory stability improvements, and security fixes, but the big news as far as we’re concerned is the number one item on the list — Improved JavaScript performance

Desktop Safari is the big brother of the iPhone’s Mobile OS X Safari, and they share a rendering engine (WebKit), and a JavaScript engine (Nitro), and improvements in desktop Safari and Nitro have traditionally filtered down to Mobile Safari with the subsequent iPhone OS update. That’s right, we’re looking at you iPhone 3.2 (where ever you are!)

Since the current iPhone 3.1 Safari is still outperforming even brand-new devices like the Droid, that may seem a little greedy, but we know Google’s Android and Palm’s webOS aren’t sitting still in the rendering race, and have updates of their own in the pipeline, so once again, competition benefits the end users. Bring. It..

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Apple Updates Mac/Windows Safari to 4.0.4 — Raises Stakes in JavaScript Wars

Update: Engadget re-did the math and it looks like the iPhone 3G S is actually 21% faster than the Palm Pre (for now).

According to Anandtech, Dieter was spot on in his iPhone 3G S vs. Palm Pre browser speed test video. (as was our iPhone 3G S vs. iPhone 3G smackdown video)

The bigger story, of course, is not only do we have several great devices pushing competition and better serving users these days, but Mobile WebKit (the rendering engine behind Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome Lite, Palm Pre’s browser, and Nokia S60 (tip of the hat to Sascha Segan) has become the mobile internet platform.

That it’s relentlessly standards based, scales elegantly from desktop (where it ironically holds minimal share) to handset, and is continually being improved upon makes us especially happy for all concerned devices.

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Updated: iPhone 3G S 21% Faster vs. Palm Pre in Web Render Benchmarks

Two iPhones enter, only one can be left standing. Which one will it be? Well, both devices got the Nitro JavaScript rendering engine boost courtesy of iPhone 3.0, but the iPhone 3G S brought a little gun to this knife-fight in the form of double the RAM, a faster GPU, and a super souped up processor with higher clock speed and phat’er pipes. (Think 486 vs. Pentium on the desktop).

So let’s just load up our friends CrackBerry.com, PreCentral.net, theiPhoneblog.com HQ, and Steve Job’s perennial New York Times test page and see.

(No, not which will win — we already know the answer to that! — but by how much?!)

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TiPb iPhone 3G S vs. iPhone 3G Browser Speed Smackdown

We so fondly remember Palm’s Roger McNamee stating the Pre would be a million times faster on the web than the iPhone (now retracted), and even our sister-site PreCentral.net jumped on that band wagon, saying the Pre looked to be 4x faster than the iPhone.

Of course, we mentioned that on Sprint, lacking simultaneous voice and data, even a million times zero is still zero. Less flippantly, however, when Safari 4 Beta shipped for the desktop with its new ultra-fast Nitro (formerly SquirrelFish) rendering engine, we figured it would only be a matter of time before that scaled down to the iPhone’s version of Safari (based on the same WebKit foundations as desktop Safari, as is the Palm Pre browser and Android Chrome Lite).

Now Daring Fireball and Wayne Pan posit that turbo boost might have already happened in iPhone OS 3.0:

Wayne Pan has braved the NDA waters and published JavaScript benchmarks for iPhone OS 3.0, and they are impressive — with results ranging between 3× and 10× faster than iPhone OS 2.2. And I’ll confirm that MobileSafari on iPhone OS 3.0 passes my simple “could be Nitro” recursion depth test.

From what we’ve seen of 3.0, it seems that way to us as well. Along with HTML5, CSS, 2D and 3D animation, anti-phishing, AutoFill, etc., it will be interesting to see what Apple and the WebKit team can pull of by the time iPhone 3.0 launches this summer…

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3.0: Mobile Safari Using Nitro Engine for Ultra-Fast Web Browsing?