undefined | Better HN

0 pointsbzbarsky11y ago0 comments

Please check your history. There was a JavaScript performance war in full swing, with both Firefox and Safari producing new JITs and working on improving them, before Chrome ever appeared.

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IvyMike11y ago

My memory was that there was a cold war, but not hot-and-heavy competition until chrome, although this article seems to agree with you.

But man, Chrome sure got good fast.

http://www.cnet.com/news/browser-war-centers-on-once-obscure...

bzbarskyOP11y ago

Your memory might be based on press releases, not what was actually going on. Safari and Firefox had the jits in their development builds, and were actively competing with each other, but hadn't shipped them in a final release yet at the point when the existence of Chrome was announced. Those JITs shipped a few months after that, with the attendant press hoopla.

cromwellian11y ago

Safari never had the marketshare to make its JIT a 'threat'.

Besides, Chrome didn't just introduce V8, it also introduced a cleaner UI, sandboxed tabs, and eventually, a much better set of DevTools than any other browser.

To deny that competition from Chrome didn't put pressure on other vendors I think is trying to willfully discount it's contributions for political, not technical reasons.

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