IE's JavaScript Focus May Be Its Undoing

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» 15 May 2009

IE's JavaScript Focus May Be Its Undoing

Microsoft's erroneous focus on certain upgrades in Internet Explorer's (IE) management of Javascript has cost the latest version of the browser the race against competitors like Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome. The 3D-graphics specialist Futuremark has made a browser list that tests their speed. IE 8 has come in ninth place out of the ten browsers tested, while IE 7 came in last.

In a list of the speediest browsers in the market that includes the latest available versions of Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Opera Software's Opera browser (with several of them still in beta), Safari 4.0 leads the pack, followed by Chrome 2.0.172.23 beta (which came in at number two) and Chrome 1.0.154.65 (which came in at number three). Firefox 3.5b4 beta previously occupied the top spot in an earlier list, and has been steadily taking the Internet PC browser market share from IE with its tab-based technology and intuitiveness.

These figures and statistics are rather ironic considering Microsoft's attempts to promote the recently launched IE 8 on the basis of speed. An in-house video released last March alleged that IE 8 was one third quicker than Chrome and three times faster than Firefox when it comes to loading web pages.

Microsoft's competitors have been gradually improving the performance of JavaScript in their browsers as of late as well. Firefox has recently added TraceMonkey to its arsenal (which uses Adobe System's nanojit and improved tracing to augment SpiderMonkey performance), Chrome now features Google's V8 open-source C++ engine, and Safari 4.0 will soon adopt the SquirrelFish Extreme JavaScript engine for enhanced operation.

However, Microsoft has taken a different course in augmenting its browser's JavaScript management, contending that it is responsible for a measly 20% of a webpage's load time. Instead of improving IE 8's JavaScript engine to keep up with its competition, Microsoft has opted to optimize IE 8 as a whole for the most typical of user scenarios.

Ergo, the IE 8 team merely focused on fine-tuning JavaScript usage for faster lookups, string, and array. There were also alterations to the core architecture to diminish the cost of lookup patterns, function calls, and object creation.

Futuremark studies are based upon the feedback of 400,000 respondents using its new Peacekeeper service developed to gauge a browser's JavaScript performance. Peacekeeper then bases its grades on rendered frames per second or operations per second depending on the nature of the test.