JavaScript speed, the browser wars, and the death of IE6

Over the past year the Firefox, WebKit, and now Chrome teams have been going back and forth with faster and faster JavaScript engines. This dramatic change in speed will become a breaking change on the web.

Shortly after each engine update a number of blogs run all the engines through the benchmarks. When Internet Explorer is included it is always in last place. Not just by a little bit but by a significant amount. It is so slow now that it is often left out of the graph altogether. The IE team is working on it and the latest beta of IE 8 is three times faster than IE7, but it is still three times slower than Firefox 3.0.1. And since that article Firefox and everyone else have gotten even faster engines, not just by a little, but by a significant amount.

This isn't about IE8 or IE7, but about IE6 and its market share. IE6 currently has around 35% market share which is a huge number of users to fight for. All of the JavaScript wars are about making those AJAX and heavy JavaScript applications run faster. With developers using fast computers with Firefox one can see what is going to happen when someone on an older 800 Mhz computer and IE6 tries to load the site. Already I have heard of developers migrating users off IE to Firefox because it would take the user several minutes to load their JavaScript heavy site. In the next year as developers take advantage of the new speed this huge swath of users will find themselves feeling more and more pain.

Developers might try speeding up a thing or two, but the speed difference between the engines will only allow a developer to do so much and many developers will simply ignore the problem. Sure users can still use the site if they are willing to wait, but eventually they will hear about how their friend doesn't have the same problem with Firefox/Safari/Chrome and upgrade. When Firefox got tabs it was a great feature and you could still browse the web with IE6. While tabs and addons have caused a downswing in IE's market share it might be JavaScript performance that will be the tipping point for the end of IE6.