Browsers are slow

When Safari 3 was announced, the marketing pitch centered around its 'blazing speed'. Steve Jobs even used precious keynote time explaining a chart comparing browser execution speeds for a javascript benchmark.

That was great news, mostly because it refocus debate on the current shockingly poor state of browser performance. Take any site with a bit of Ajax code, e.g. Gmail, and it's guaranteed to be far slower than a client equivalent.

In the past, javascript speed didn't matter. If you're using a dial-up modem, then the limiting factor is bandwidth, and you don't notice javascript performance. If you're accessing a Web 1.0 site with limited javascript, there won't be a delay.

But the world has moved on. Modern client applications - such as games - ruthlessly use native processing power, including rich graphics and parallel threads. Browsers just haven't caught up.

It's encouraging to see, particularly in the Mozilla community, some serious debate about how to speed things up. Work has started on Tamarin, a project to compile javascript to native code on the fly. Firefox 3 will use the Cairo graphics software library, which can take advantage of hardware acceleration. And there's been great debate about making parallel browsers.

It'll be a few years before most of these efforts come to fruition. In the meantime, Moore's law and a few performance tweaks will help a bit, but we'll be left with great web applications unwritten due to performance concerns.