[codeulike]

javascript - exactly - before Chrome v1 no one was even talking about speeding up javascript in the browser space. Chrome v1 blew everything out of the water with that. And js speed has a big impact on everything these days, pretty much

[BrendanEich]

23 Aug 2008: https://brendaneich.com/2008/08/tracemonkey-javascript-light...

01 Sep 2008: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser...

TraceMonkey was in the works since late Spring 2008. Apple was also doing more advanced JS performance work before Chrome launched.

V8 had the world-class VM team and at least two years lead (Lars Bak went to Google in 2004; I met him in August 2006 when he was definitely working on V8), so it indeed was fastest at the usual benchmarks, but not by the sometimes-asserted 3x factor.

Maciej Stachowiak of Apple and I were both noting back then how V8's advantage seemed more like 1.3x at the time, but I don't have performance charts from Sep 2008 at hand. Perhaps someone reading does.

V8 got faster over time, as did other engines. Again, it's an excellent piece of work and tops by many measures, but not all -- see http://kripken.github.com/mloc_emscripten_talk/#/17 for two large benchmarks of three where SpiderMonkey beats V8 currently.

/be

[mh-]

Speaking as a dev, but from a user's POV, the thing that made jump to Chrome on release day was the immediate recognition that a single bogged down tab did not impact the responsiveness of the chrome (heh) and other tabs noticeably.

I remember, vividly, in Firefox: I would middle-click on a Slashdot link to load it in the background while reading the current one. My focused tab would begin to hesitate and sometimes altogether freeze for several seconds. In Chrome, only the spinning tab would be affected by their bloated DOM.

[Yoric]

In case somebody hasn't noticed, let me emphasize that the author of the previous post is Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript.

[codeulike]

I stand corrected - thanks Brendan!