After I blogged about
my first steps with HTML 5's canvas, I tried out the code on various browsers installed on my PC, and was surprised that it ran very slowly on Firefox (I'm using
Opera as main browser). That's why I updated the post with '
Wow, this is quite slow on FireFox. Opera rules. :)'. But some users begged to differ, claiming FireFox would render my nice JavaScript Fractal in a fraction of the time Opera needed to do so.
It looked like I still had some quite old Firefox version installed, and since about Firefox 3.1, that browser is now using JIT compilation for JavaScript, based on the open source library
Nanojit, giving it a huge performance boost. And in point of fact, my canvas experiment really runs incredibly fast on Firefox 3.5. Impressive. It appears Firefox is even faster than the hyped Chrome V8 JavaScript engine, interesting.
Maybe we - as game developers - should keep that Nanojit library in mind, could be useful in a future project. But as long as sentenses like "
Figuring out how to compile it is left as an exercise for the reader" appear on the website of the Nanojit library, maybe we could wait still a bit. ;)