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JSC loves ES6

webkit.org

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Re: JSC loves ES6

#41

The benchmark at the bottom showing how far behind Firefox has fallen on JS performance is pretty telling. It confirms my own recent observation that Firefox is at least 3-6 times slower in practice for the particular app I'm working on.

A vendor is always the fastest when they roll out a new benchmark. It's disingenuous to suggest a browser is '3-6x slower' based on a score on one benchmark, when all the vendors actively compete on and optimize against a large set of benchmarks, and compare each others' performance numbers on individual tests to understand engine weaknesses/strengths. fwiw, Chrome, Firefox and Safari have all been fairly competitive…

The performance difference I see with my own app with Firefox is exactly the benchmark's 3-6x, that's not a benchmark but real world usage.

It's enough to make the startup feel slow (3-4 seconds of being unresponsive) and things like animations and drag and drop features to feel janky. Running a non-minified build (about 20MB of JS, minifies to about 1MB) also completely murders Firefox reducing it to a slideshow, making Firefox unusable for development, while Chrome works just fine.

Re: JSC loves ES6

#42
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that should be pretty non-surprising. There are 4 mayor Javascript engines and 3 of them belong to some of the largest companies in the world (Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft). It was just a matter of time before they caught up through throwing money at the problem. I use Firefox (except for Hangouts) but I understand Chrome's advantaged situation will probably allow them to be the sole competitor in the near-mid…

On the other hand, it's not like Firefox is the side project of a few of people in their spare time -- the Mozilla Foundation has annual revenue of over $400 million! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation

$400 million looks like a lot until you remember that Apple have $267 billion in cash reserves. The Mozilla Foundation's entire annual revenue isn't even a fifth of a percent of what Apple have just sitting around because they can't find a better use for it. The fact that Mozilla are able to punch even this far above their weight is kind of impressive.

Re: JSC loves ES6

#43
post #33

It seems weird to focus so much on es2015 features, when so many of them are polyfillable (not optimal, sure, but still) when there is such uneven support for DOM (and related browser) API features in safari. I mean, where are service workers? Give me a nice, cross-platform way to handle offline-first and I'll be happy. But hey, it isn't like there's some kind of browser monopoly on iOS or anything, like there was in…

ES6 features are faster when natively supported and natively optimized like in JSC.

Re: JSC loves ES6

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s right. Source?

Just Chrome, but yes: http://web.archive.org/web/20160303192336/http://kangax.gith...

That shows WebKit supporting tailcalls. It doesn’t a show Chrome supporting tail calls.

I vividly remember us implementing tail calls and v8 not having them yet at that time. This was almost 2 years ago.

Re: JSC loves ES6

#45

I’ve been staying away from most new ES6 features because when I tested them a year ago (either transpiled or with native support) they were slow as molasses in every browser I tried. Hopefully having some better benchmarks gets Firefox and Chrome developers to also get to work on this.

Native ES6 is faster in WebKit than polyfill/transpiled.

Re: JSC loves ES6

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just Chrome, but yes: http://web.archive.org/web/20160303192336/http://kangax.gith...

That shows WebKit supporting tailcalls. It doesn’t a show Chrome supporting tail calls. I vividly remember us implementing tail calls and v8 not having them yet at that time. This was almost 2 years ago.

That's what I said.

Re: JSC loves ES6

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That shows WebKit supporting tailcalls. It doesn’t a show Chrome supporting tail calls. I vividly remember us implementing tail calls and v8 not having them yet at that time. This was almost 2 years ago.

That's what I said.

Chrome and WebKit are two different things. So, no, you didn’t just say that.

Re: JSC loves ES6

#48
post #33

It seems weird to focus so much on es2015 features, when so many of them are polyfillable (not optimal, sure, but still) when there is such uneven support for DOM (and related browser) API features in safari. I mean, where are service workers? Give me a nice, cross-platform way to handle offline-first and I'll be happy. But hey, it isn't like there's some kind of browser monopoly on iOS or anything, like there was in…

I'm pretty sure Safari's features are intentionally crippled to keep their app ecosystem safe. See: web notifications.

Re: JSC loves ES6

#49
post #42
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it's not like Firefox is the side project of a few of people in their spare time -- the Mozilla Foundation has annual revenue of over $400 million! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation

$400 million looks like a lot until you remember that Apple have $267 billion in cash reserves. The Mozilla Foundation's entire annual revenue isn't even a fifth of a percent of what Apple have just sitting around because they can't find a better use for it. The fact that Mozilla are able to punch even this far above their weight is kind of impressive.

1) Apple's cash assets aren't actually cash or just a bank account. It's accounting speak for liquid assets. Any investments that they could divest fairly quickly and easily and repurpose to finance other capital expenditures. The money isn't sitting around doing nothing; in the meantime it's invested in a safe portfolio which attempts to grow it. Imagine a hedge fund for just one LP.

2) Apple is a mega-company which has a bajillion lines of business and produces hardware. The WebKit team is a tiny tiny tiny sliver of what Apple does and cares about; so its budget is probably a lot closer to Mozilla's.

Re: JSC loves ES6

#50
post #30
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This benchmark is only representative for websites built with lots of new ES6+ features. On general JS performance, Firefox isn't quite that far behind (but still behind to the best of my knowledge).

And that's all fine...in a lab. In the real world, all I have to do to experience Firefox's performance is click "Home" on my Twitter account. More often than not I'll get an alert that "A script has stopped responding [...] Continue / Stop Script," and it will still take 60+ secs to finish refreshing the page. Meanwhile, all Firefox tabs and window instances are frozen.

Are you sure that's mere slowness?

I've had Firefox block more js/elements than Chrome and sometimes I think other bits of the page are busy waiting for some event that will never happen.

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