A Modest Construct | Internet Explorer

Posts tagged `Internet Explorer`

¶ Using YUI compressor in a web project

Last year, I moved our small programming department from using JDeveloper and editing shared files directly on a network drive to using Netbeans 6.x and a proper version control system (Subversion).

After the initial learning curve, this has all been going swimmingly. I merged my first development branch into the trunk yesterday, and this branch just so happens to dovetail nicely into the whole point of this post, which is the YUI compressor, an open-source javascript and CSS minification tool developed by Yahoo’s YUI team.

¶ Javascript performance is about to get turbo-charged

Internet Explorer

Firefox

Safari

I personally think the friendly rivalry between the open-source Webkit engine (which powers Safari, among other things) and Mozilla (the Gecko engine, actually) is one of the best things to happen to browser development in years. The constant one-upsmanship can only lead to better browsers. Well, Internet Explorer will constantly be the limiting factor, but we can dream, can’t we?

The latest thing to hit browser source repos is javascript engine improvement based on something called “trace trees”: essentially, javascript gets translated into native bytecode. The Webkit engine made the announcement a few months ago, with code codenamed “Squirrelfish,” promising massive improvements. That article’s also got a pretty good writeup.

Open Source being what it is, it was only a matter of time before Mozilla announced their own version of a trace-tree-based javascript engine. John Resig has a good writeup, as done Brendan Eich.

¶ Javascript engines in 32-bit and 64-bit browsers

I recently performed some cursory Javascript benchmarks with the new version of Firefox and Safari; curious about performance, I decided to do some testing of 32-bit browsers against their 64-bit counterparts. On Windows Vista x64, the only two browsers so available to me are Internet Explorer 7 and a recent nightly build of Firefox 3. The 64-bit comes from the Mozilla x86-64 project, specifically the build from 21 March 2008. The 32-bit build is a proper nightly from the same date from the official Mozilla FTP.

My hypothesis, before performing the tests, was that the 64-bit compilation would have little or no effect on the Javascript engine performance. It’s so difficult to optimize Javascript rendering, which is inherently single-threaded, and it seems likely to only benefit from a faster CPU clock than bigger memory registers. Afterward, I felt vindicated: Internet Explorer is likely the best test, and the difference was not statistically significant. In Firefox’s case, the 64-bit build was actually significantly worse, though this could easily be due to some other factor I have not taken into account; I have assumed that the source was compiled on the same date. See below for more details.