Crankshaft for V8 in Google Chrome
I have to admit, Google Chrome is a fantastic browser. It has been really good since the 4.x series, but it wasn't horrible in the 1.x series, which is where I started using it for Javascript-heavy AJAX web systems I was working on. I've seen it get better and better, and while at any one time it might not have been the fastest or cleanest, I can say that the engineers at Google have gone at this with a passion. They have consistently made this better, faster than virtually anything else out there.
It simply passed up Firefox without so much as a word. It's close to Safari, but Safari's integration with the OS is better and the focus on rendering is greater. But it's close.
Yesterday, Google announced that the engineers had once again made significant enhancements to the V8 JavaScript engine that is the engine for Chrome. Amazing stuff... a continuously monitoring optimizer to see what sections of code are getting hit a lot and then to re-optimize them to make them faster. The longer a big page is in the browser, the faster it will get. Amazing.
I'm tempted to get back into AJAX development. It was a blast.
They say I should see it in the Mac versions of Chrome dev soon. Very interesting.