JavaScript – The monkeys in 2013 (opens in new tab)

I believe that they are absolute values though. IIUC, a browser doubling their score on one of these benchmarks is an approximation for being twice as fast at performing the benchmarked functionality. Firefox's improvement was enormous in 2013, but these graphs make their improvement seem (eyeballing it) about 5 to 10x more than it was.

> most deceptive graphing techniques

They are deceptive because they exaggerate features of the data in order to improve perception of configuration changes. If every graph started at zero, many datasets would look like flat lines... not a great user experience when graphing.

Of course it's the fault of the person presenting them. If they are competent enough to understand what they are presenting, they are competent enough to adjust a y axis baseline.

You are thinking of SpiderNode, and/or NodeMonkey. Other than the principals leaving Mozilla for Facebook, this work was superseded by Tim Caswell's Luvmonkey:

https://github.com/creationix/luvmonkey

Turns out Node is really well factored, so emulating the V8 API on top of SpiderMonkey, especially back in 2011 as the Spider-Node-Monkey project tried, is harder. It's the "long way 'round".

Binding libuv to any engine that implements ES5+ is easier and gives Node interop.

As for XULRunner, sorry -- no leverage. If you see some, make it a business and show us up.

You say 'could have competed with node-webkit' despite the fact that XULRunner existed for many years, was used to ship commercial products, and still withered on the vine because nobody gave a shit about it.

It's not a product anyone wants. node-webkit will likely get left by the wayside in the same fashion once people realize the issues with building graphical desktop applications on top of a browser.