33 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
33 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: post
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title: Chrome Kicks Butt
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date: 2014-05-12 11:00:00
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category: JavaScript
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permalink: /blog/2014/05/12/
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---
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I haven't been closely monitoring the performance of PCjs across various browsers. Most of my browser testing has
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been limited to "Does the latest version still work in all current web browsers?"
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However, at some point during the last couple months, Chrome's performance suddenly jumped through the roof. On my
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2.8GHz Intel Core i7 MacBook Pro, Chrome v34.0.1847.131 easily punches through the 120Mhz barrier on a PCjs machine
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running PC-DOS 2.00.
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That's roughly a 3x-4x increase over previous versions of Chrome. Safari used to be the performance champ, capable
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of running a PCjs machine at a top speed of around 70-80MHz, while Chrome was less than half that, and Firefox was
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slower still.
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Chrome has now leap-frogged Safari in a big way, almost doubling Safari's speed. And with Chrome's superior
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Developer Tools, Chrome is clearly the "Browser of Choice," whether you're just playing with PCjs or actually
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debugging it.
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Firefox is a bit of a disappointment, given all the hoopla over [asm.js](http://asmjs.org/) and other investments
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that Mozilla is making. I've taken a "wait-and-see" attitude toward asm.js, because PCjs is hand-coded JavaScript,
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and I'm not prepared to build a preprocessor that converts the code to asm.js semantics solely for the benefit of a
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single browser.
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Chrome's approach to making regular JavaScript run faster seems to be a winning strategy so far, at least for apps
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like PCjs.
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*[@jeffpar](http://twitter.com/jeffpar)*
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*May 12, 2014*
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