A Blog From Behind the Trenches

Where do all these JavaScript Benhcmark keep coming from? They seem to be growing on trees these days.

Microsoft doesn't seem to care for (javascript) speed. They are currently verry happy to (finally) pass that acid 2 test. Give them another 3 or 4 years and they'll start improving their speed and boosting how IE will be faster then ever before

Originally posted by sirnh1:

They seem to be growing on trees these days.

That's probably because it's a huge business opportunity with all the browsers around these days for the average user to test. If benchmarking companies get their foot in the door now with browsers then in a few years time when these benchmarks are even more prolific among users they may well have become a trusted name, and as haavard points out they are vendor neutral, allowing for a unique market position (attracting users to their website in droves = cash).

@haavard
But the main difference in 'real speed' is with the UI, and this is why Opera has loyal users. Cacheing web pages alone saves the most time (*z key, z key, z key* = homepage!), keyboard shortcuts come next then mouse gestures, then opera's rendering speed in 4th place, which only a year or two ago was way ahead of the game anyway, it's not like it's been left behind. No sweat I say. In my early use of opera I liked being able to choose when to render the main page 'Redraw Instantly...after 1sec...2, etc.' I would most like to see improvements in this area. I was delighted to hear that in future builds we may be able to turn off Flash! Just more control over what we see when and where. For instance I made the 'desktop wish' that current and most recently used tabs from last time are loaded first when restarting opera, with the oldest used tab loading last in the background. The other week I discovered 'shift + g'! It's probably been there years but I love it! One click and I remove the crap on a website and can begin reading black text on a white background.

I think experttease meant rendering speed is fourth in his personal ranking of most important Opera (performance) features following memory caching, keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures.

I kind of agree, because those other features increase productivity and actual "browsing speed" far more than a few milliseconds saved in JavaScript execution time.

you misunderstood. in the context of the sentence I was talking about the degree to which different elements of opera 'speed up' my browsing. opera's relative rendering speed gain over say IE(any number) comes 4th in my list of importance. I didn't mention any specific benchmarks and nor do I care for them. you could have realised this from the positive tone of my comments on Opera Desktop.

How do I inject code so that I can underline your whole post ?
In other word, I vow to thee.

But they also test a bit of drawing, DOM and layout, but just a tiny bit.