JavaScript Compilation: Is this what will turn the web into the new desktop?

The Web is the New Desktop

Can we finally expect to see web browser truly competing with native apps? 

IE 9 does JavaScript in the background on the first load of a page, running in non-compiled mode until the scripts are ready, and then they run from the native commands after that.  It is detailed here on the IE MSDN blog.  They talk about going beyond the benchmarks, which look like this:

Going beyond the benchmarks means thinking about how the web page as a whole responds to the user in a practical way, and JavaScript performance is just one part of that.  Frankly, this is kind of ironic coming from the teams that put out IE7 and 8, because they talked about the same things when those things were introduced.  I think the problems with the legacy IE codebase is exactly that – too much legacy bloat.

Most of the gains you see with IE 9 are about the JavaScript compilation happening on a second core, and hardware acceleration.  Ars Technica covered that here. 

But IE isn’t the only browser going that way – Google is putting 2D acceleration into Chrome 6 and the Mozilla team are getting it into Firefox for HTML5 elements.

Mobile Web is the New Desktop

On the phone OS side of things, Android 2.2 introduces a similar behaviour to what IE 9 is doing with JIT  (Just In Time) compilation.

Currently, I am using an iPhone or iPad for mobile browsing, so while I can’t compare performance to Android, I certainly welcome the competition. 

Also, it’s useful to note that the Blackberry 6.0 OS will be using a webkit based browser, so that’s reassuring.  Coding for Blackberry browsers is a real challenge at the moment.

What does this all mean?  It’s a great time to be a web developer, but don’t sit on your laurels!  CLient side programming in the browser is getting a whole lot more interesting.

more later – joel