[Qt-interest] QtWebKit vs. Safari Javascript Performance

[Michael Vernick]

I recently created a simple Qt program that employs a QWebView for
rendering Web pages.  I compared the performance of the QWebView enabled
program vs. the Safari browser running the Sunspider Javascript
benchmark. (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html) 
This is on Windows.

Since Safari and QWebView both use the WebKit engine, I would have
thought that the Javascript performance would be similar.  Safari,
however, runs the benchmark about 5 times faster than the Qt program.

Can someone enlighten me on why Safari would be so much faster?  Do they
have different Javascript engines?  Am I missing some kind of
optimization in Qt? (I created the program in Qt Creator, and made sure
I compiled the 'release' version).

Thanks,

mv