I’ve been reading, as I am sure you have too (right?), about the ongoing competition that’s breaking out between rivals in the browser development world regarding JavaScript performance in their browsers.
First, WebKit announced SquirrelFish, their super-fast JS engine that kicked the pants of anything in the current browsers (as far as I am aware, this still hasn’t reached Safari). Then Mozilla fought back with TraceMonkey, using ever more complex programming and efficiency techniques to improve JS runtime performance, which will be in Firefox 3.1 but switched off by default as it’s still being tested. Then, to much fanfare, Google released their Chrome browser with the V8 JavaScript engine which they claimed was the fastest out there (I beg to differ when it comes to DOM interaction, but certainly for hardcore code, it rocked).
Now, the WebKit team has announce SquirrelFish Extreme, which initial benchmarks show runs 36% faster than V8 and 55% faster than TraceMonkey (http://summerofjsc.blogspot.com/2008/09/squirrelfish-extreme-has-landed.html ).
The future certainly looks bright (and speedy) for those of us building Web applications. Very exciting.