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A Hidden Cost of Javascript [updated] (bueno.org)
50 points by aristus on Feb 17, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments



JS loading is slow in FF, but the real killer is anything DOM related. On large pages this is measured in seconds not milliseconds. The worst part is that it scales non-linearly with # of DOM nodes on the page, # of DOM nodes loaded in other tabs in FF, how long it's been running and who knows what else.

The longer FF works on improvements on benchmarks on which it is already fast, the more market share Chrome will take by making fast things that actually matter.


I agree 100% and have been complaining about exactly this for a long time (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=325742). The fact that IE is the whipping-boy of the web community has caused Firefox to get more of a free ride than it deserves. That will eventually change.


Sorta looks to me to confirm something we already knew, V8 blows everything else away.


The exact versions of the browsers are available when you mouse over the column headers.


Chrome is exceptionally fast, apparently.


It does appear fast, but I'm withholding judgement. I'm not certain if it's doing caching tricks or whether their parser really is 10x faster. It certainly is CPU-bound, which is as good as it gets, and it's more stable in terms of memory use.

See this graph: http://carlos.bueno.org/images/chrome-cliff.png


Some really nice timing graphs at the end there.


It's notable how little FF improved between 3.5 and 3.6.


The big improvements in JS performance in 3.6 were in regex, GC, and tracing.

Edit: details at http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/01/javascript-speedups-in-fire...


Animation in FF 3.6 is noticeably smoother, apparently due to the improvements in GC. In other words, it may not have improved much in the specific areas these benchmarks measure, but it's important not to take that to mean that the JS engine didn't improve.




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