With SquirrelFish in line to make Safari 4.0 the fastest browser ever (assuming you count with the same number of fingers as Apple), I’ve been dying to get my hands on a supercharged Webkit nightly and get an early taste of running javascript heavy web applications in a next generation browser… at least until Google Chrome (Windows only *grumble* unless you count Chromium) upped the ante with its blazingly fast V8 Javascript engine, and took the all wind out of my sails.

However, I’m absolutely delighted to see that most of the other important browser developers have risen to the challenge. With low-power netbooks selling as fast as manufacturers can make them, it’s no secret that the demand for cloud computing is only going to rise. And for web applications to provide a good user experience on a low-power machine, a reliable super-tuned javascript engine is an absolute must. So, where are the major browsers at in the race for the most fastester javascript engine evar?

1. Google V8

Since V8 is running javascript in pure native machine code, obviously nothing can be any faster than that, until the V8 developers optimize the compiled code to squeeze a bit more performance out the CPU. Before long, Google will be able to save you from running a pesky operating system that hogs all your cpu and run Chrome on the bare metal. Even with all this room for improvement, V8 is still the most fastester javascript engine evar.

2. Tracemonkey

Long before the V8 announcements from Google, the folks working on Firefox have implemented an interesting trace trees byte code optimizer for their spidermonkey engine.

Looking at the benchmarks on Andreas Gal’s blog, it’s good to see that in Andreas’ own words: “No matter which metric you choose to apply, Firefox now has the [most] fastest[er] javascript engine in the world [evar]”.

3. SquirrelFish Extreme

Not to be left out in the cold, the brainy chaps working on Webkit (which was already the most fastester javasript engine evar before all this pesky V8 business) have implemented a whole raft of the optimizations they promised us in the original SquirrelFish announcement to bring us SquirrelFish Extreme, by far the most fastester javascript engine in the world evar!!

Damn. Now I’m dying to get my hands on a supercharged Webkit nightly all over again!?!?