alt Hacker NewsI got a question for everyone: as a web user, have you been affected by performance limitations of a particular JS engine? Have you switched browsers b/c of JS speed?
My n=1 as a long time Firefox user is that performance is a non-issue (for the sites I frequent). I’m much more likely to switch browsers because of annoying bugs, like crashes due to FF installed as a snap.
It honestly is pretty surprising, given that JS runtime runs website code single-threaded.
Replies
No, speed / performance of JavaScript has never, in my entire history of web use, been a driving factor in picking a browser - there may be one-offs here and there where I’m annoyed I have to switch to a different browser for a few minutes due to feature support or extension availability - but I can’t remember thinking “boy I wish JavaScript didn’t run so slow”
When Chrome first came out in 2008, it was noticeably faster than any competitors. Users with only moderate tech knowledge were switching in droves because it was faster. Part of this was that it had a process-per-tab model properly making use of multi core CPUs for the first time, but much of it was because V8 was fast.
The gap is not so big these days. JavaScriptCore, Spidermonkey, and V8 are all competent.