Well a good chunk of it doubt is all in the Network layer which is outside of "WebKit". Image compression, dns, fetching, pre-fetching, streaming, etc. You can no doubt get tons of win just by having a proxy server that gzip's everything that can be that isn't already. But that is just the tip, they mentioned image re-compressions, but what other trivial things like stripping javascript and html to reduce size.
But you could also do things like pre-compile the javascript and only send the bytecode down to the browser (starting to get in the relm of cool).
And we still haven't touched the dom. Of course the more you touch the harder it is to keep up to date with webkit.org. The real meat of this entire discussion has to be what gives the best bang for the buck? For WiFi devices all of this (guessing) is a waste of resource as my guess is that it doesn't improve the speed by much. I would expect the performance jumps on a cell network to be much better. So when is that device coming out?
With the old BlackBerry browser, MDS did image re-compressions using the Slipstream image libraries, and javascript pre-compilation for the ecma engine. It helped, but only so much. Reducing image sizes turns out to not be applicable all that often, unless you're not letting the user zoom in to 1:1 size. Degrading image quality (invisible to the average human eye) helps though.
If all they're doing is network stuff then there's nothing new here, and I doubt their gains will be very noticeable. I was hoping for something more involved.
But you could also do things like pre-compile the javascript and only send the bytecode down to the browser (starting to get in the relm of cool).
And we still haven't touched the dom. Of course the more you touch the harder it is to keep up to date with webkit.org. The real meat of this entire discussion has to be what gives the best bang for the buck? For WiFi devices all of this (guessing) is a waste of resource as my guess is that it doesn't improve the speed by much. I would expect the performance jumps on a cell network to be much better. So when is that device coming out?