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Chrome 10 Beta Boosts JavaScript Speed By 64%
CWmike writes "Google released the first beta of Chrome 10 on Thursday, and Computerworld found it to be 64% faster than its predecessor on Google's V8 JavaScript benchmarks. But in another JS benchmark — WebKit's widely-cited SunSpider — Chrome 10 beta was no faster than Chrome 9. Yesterday's Chrome 10 beta release was the first to feature 'Crankshaft,' a new optimization technology. Google engineers have previously explained why SunSpider scores for a Crankshaft-equipped Chrome show little, if any, improvement over other browsers. 'The idea [in Crankshaft] is to heavily optimize code that is frequently executed and not waste time optimizing code that is not,' said the engineers. 'Because of this, benchmarks that finish in just a few milliseconds, such as SunSpider, will show little improvement with Crankshaft. The more work an application does, the bigger the gains will be.' [Chrome 10 beta download here.]"
Given that browsers tend to cache website elements, for better speed when loading objects that haven't changed since last load, and given that, while people want their page now, their computer usually has a fair amount of idle time available, would you expect to see browsers implementing some sort of background optimization mechanism that chews over cached javascript during idle periods in order to reduce the amount of computationally expensive work that needs to be done should the page be reloaded? Or is Javascript not amenable to that level of preemptive processing?