[raganwald]

Firefox 4 would rather you write getters and setters the old fashioned way for every single object you create than reference objects’ member variables directly via dot-notation.

Bizarre, but it really emphasizes that where implementation performance is concerned, you have to test, test, test, and test some more. Your intuition about what is fast and what is slow is probably 99% correct. But the other 1% may surprise the whumpus out of you.

Also, I would consider things like this to be highly unstable unless I read a white paper from the implementation team saying that this is by design. If you hurriedly remove all of your dot references and replace them with functions, you may find a point release of the implementation changes everything again.

You have control over your implementation on the server, but users can upgrade their browsers at will without consulting you first :-)

p.s. Did I miss it, or did they only test browsers without looking at server implementation like V8 or Rhino?

[jasonfeinstein]

You're correct, we didn't test on server implementations like V8 and Rhino... You make a good point though, it would be interesting to test the results in those environments.