If web apps are to be taken seriously, they must be able to keep up with native apps–at least in terms of apparent execution speed. Google’s Chrome browser is able to do just that, but it’s not the WebKit browser engine that accomplishes the task, but rather Chrome’s v8 JavaScript engine.
The Chrome browser’s v8 JavaScript engine has been widely acclaimed for its success and efficiency, and has even been used server-side as the core of the event-driven Node.js server. Through the success of the Chrome browser, other browser makers have been driven to try to keep up with Chrome, which has improved the browsing experience for everyone.
Ironically, the Firefox browser uses over a gig and a half of memory, most of which is used by the JavaScript engine, and much of the memory used comes from the Google +1 “fastbutton.” Another example of the problem that challenges Google is its Dart programming language. A Dart “hello world” app has over 17,000 lines of code–as many developers have been so kind to point out in the comments left about that example. Google loves JavaScript, yet hates to keep up with the performance issues that JavaScript presents.
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