Google Groups,
is agonisingly slow in most web browsers I've tried. Is it "coincidentally" wonderfully fast in Chrome? Genuinely curious, yours suspiciously.
Google’s V8 engine is getting more picky about the Javascript code it optimises to boost the performance of the search giant’s browser. The current developer and beta channel releases of Chrome now come with a version of V8 that uses a new counters-based algorithm to decide which functions to optimise, Google has revealed. …
...but you still cannot move buttons around on the chrome tool bar.
Tinkering under the hood is great, but I am pretty sure there are more people wanting to simply be able to customize the layout a little like in every other browser than those asking for javascript to run another 25% faster.
V8 counts "how often Javascript fictions are called". No wonder my script is slow, I've been calling functions.
I suppose Javascript fictions are kind of like functions except that the return value isn't really true. Mind you, "not really true" applies to lots of Javascript values**, so that's nothing new.
** so-called falsy values: 0, '', undefined, null etc.
Optimization is all well and good, but JavaScript will remain an ill-suited and generally horrible technology. It turns previously simple web pages into slow-responding, unreliable, incompatible piles of garbage.
To be fair, it's possible to use just a pinch of JS without ruining a web page, but more and more people seem to think it's for writing your entire site in. Someday I hope they will wake up and re-discover HTML, perhaps saying something like "Whoa! Check this out. It renders like instantly, and works on reliably any browser! What a cool invention."
Poor developers will always ruin anything simple.
A good developer will keep the customer in mind - and add javascript sugar where it is beneficial.
A developer with a respect for his elders will also remember that javascript can be TURNED OFF. Requiring javascript for a webpage to function defeats the purpose of the World Wide Web.