Thursday, June 25, 2009

iPhone Javascript Speed: Very Good

Those who have felt compelled to read everything written at the Jaded Consumer will have already noticed that Google entered the browser wars with an interesting entry that offers its own home-built javascript engine even though it uses Apple's WebKit for rendering pages.

The news is that with Android (Google/Chrome) and iPhone (Apple/Safari) now commercially available as smartphone browser platforms, though on different hardware), Apple's entry seems to do much faster javascript work. Given the apparent speed advantage of Apple's Squirrelfish javascript engine over Google's V8 alternative, this should not be an enormous surprise.

The good news? Squirrelfish and V8 are both standards-based open-source projects whose competition and improvement will tend to erode dependence on proprietary platforms and their APIs.

The future looks brighter than it did fifteen years ago.

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