My MacBook Pro runs JavaScript 26.7x as fast as my iPad

http://www.globelogger.com/2010/04/my-macbook-pro-runs-javascript-267x-as-fast-as-my-ipad.html

by sant0sk1 • 16 years ago

29 42 16 years ago

DenisM• 16 years ago

Does it make a difference though? I think oit's plenty fast enough to run most non-game apps. It would help to see an app that's hindered by it before proclaiming a BFD.

potatolicious2• 16 years ago

> "Does it make a difference though?"

Yes, a million times yes.

> "I think oit's plenty fast enough to run most non-game apps."

Right, and that's the same argument used by a bajillion people before someone else came and ate their lunch (including Apple!). Nokia had a functional, but slow, sluggish, and substandard user experience on their phones. Apple came in and stomped all over that with their slick, super-fast, snappy UI.

IE was functional - sites worked and all - but was slow and bloated when Firefox came along and blew it out of the water in every way that mattered.

Performance always matters. When you're making the "meh, good enough" argument, you're in a prime position to be taken out spectacularly by a competitor who cares.

The complexity of JS-based webapps is going to get higher, not lower. A web-browsing device that performs JavaScript badly is a BFD.

mechanical_fish2• 16 years ago

The complexity of JS-based webapps is going to get higher, not lower.

Only if that's the winning tradeoff. If, in fact, "ability to run well on a mobile device that is desperate to conserve battery power" turns out to be a more valuable trait in a particular segment of the market than "has lots and lots of complex JS logic that takes power to run" then software will evolve accordingly.

ugh• 16 years ago

It certainly matters but it might just be the right trade-off in this situation. Or not.

I think nobody would argue that performance doesn’t matter, it’s just that you can’t always have everything and then you better pick the right stuff. Apple probably thinks that JS performance is good enough. For now. And that’s a attitude I would have no problems with.

nimrody• 16 years ago

Depending on the application. The ipad is much more dependent on webapps so performance is important.

Here on a Macbook Pro (Chrome latest version), Google docs is not always a pleasant experience -- especially when opening nontrivial spreadsheets.

buster2• 16 years ago

Ohhh, yes it does. My company is currently working on a quite complex Web-UI and it's a huge (!!) difference.

As according to everyone the web shall displace desktop apps in about every area, this means that really complex web application must be able to run.

A slow browser will only lead to the webapps we have today which are not very complex in comparison to full fledged desktop apps (see Google Docs vs. Office, Mailclient vs. gmail, etc.).

wendroid2• 16 years ago

If everyone bought an iPad your company's product would die, not the iPad.

rufo• 16 years ago

Yes, it does.

I wrote a small HTML5 offline-capable web app, processing a ~100KB JSON file with around 200 items. For ease of development, I initially used a JSON query library, which was perfectly fast on my laptop, a bit pokey on my 3GS, and - as I found out rather late - amazingly slow on an iPhone 3G.

I removed the library in question and rewrote my queries to use JS1.6's filter function; along with some template optimization, I managed to get the delay down to somewhat reasonable... but it's still a touch pokey on original 3G iPhones and older Android phones for my tastes.

There's likely more optimization I could have done, but I tested far too late on slower devices and just didn't have enough time. In the future we're looking at either writing a native app or using HTML5 database storage - but most importantly, testing far more regularly on slower devices. We've also reconsidered writing some truly large applications in HTML5, as we're rather worried devices will just be too slow, and we won't find out until late in development.

(The app in question is http://pax.expojunkie.com/, if anyone wants to take a look.)

tl;dr: Yes, JavaScript performance can be a problem. If you're writing a JavaScript-heavy site, get the slowest device you expect your users to have and test it regularly.

swannodette• 16 years ago

I'm surprised the gap isn't much larger.

wmf3• 16 years ago

Why? 2.66 GHz / 1 GHz is only 2.66x; that means there's a factor of ten difference due to software and processor architecture.

chime• 16 years ago

Those are the max. speeds. In power-saving mode, I highly doubt the iPad runs at 1Ghz for anything.

nfg2• 16 years ago

The mbp is almost certainly dual core.

danielrhodes• 16 years ago

Using the same test, my MBP is 206 times faster (@347ms) than my 3GS (@17559ms).

cesare2• 16 years ago

17559/347 = 50 times faster.

jws• 16 years ago

As long as we are picking on portables, my iMac is 340 times faster than my iPhone (original model).

I can say that frequently make a frowney face at my iPhone and wonder what the heck it is doing while I wait, but that I never have done that to my iPad. So while the iPad browser is not in the running for "fastest javascript platform on the planet", it is "fast" for everything I've done in real life with it.

sadiq• 16 years ago

It would be interesting to see a comparison of Javascript performance per Watt.

mechanical_fish2• 16 years ago

Or per pound.

scorpion032• 16 years ago

or per Dollar (paid for the device)!

groxter6• 16 years ago

The reason that it IS a BFD is that Steve Jobs is now saying they have "high performance HTML5" on iPad. This is evidently not true. Here is an app for which it makes a big difference, something I prepared on my MacBook Pro (with the iPad in mind) only to be pwned by Apple's anti-competitive exclusion of the JS JIT compiler from iPad Safari: http://grokware.com/ff.php

akeefer2• 16 years ago

How exactly is that exclusion anti-competitive? Presumably Apple wants JS to be fast on the iPad just as much as anyone else does, and would only exclude something like that for a good reason.

groxter6• 16 years ago

You presume too much. Think, man. Free high-performance HTML5 web apps are 1) not under their control and 2) not profit-making for Apple, as they bypass the App Store.

groxter6• 16 years ago

Incidentally, I just tried the latest "fastest ever" Google Chrome with this. The frame rate DROPPED on my machine from 48fps to 18fps. I'm getting the feeling that pushing the performance limits of compiled JavaScript is not an effective endeavor right now.

yumraj• 16 years ago

Demo of "fast" HTML5 in iPad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmbZkqORX4

Edit: put "fast" in quotes per the suggestion below

treyp• 16 years ago

you should have put 'fast' in quotes.

for those who haven't watched it, it's a video about how awful the HTML5 experience is on the iPad so far, not only because of speed but because developers haven't developed for the touch events.

cesare2• 16 years ago

I got 12961ms on my HTC Desire (Android, 1Ghz cpu).

JoelSutherland• 16 years ago

24088 on the Palm Pre. (Dual core 500mhz)

My MacBook Pro runs JavaScript 26.7x as fast as my iPad

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