Infrequently Noted

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.

Comments for Various Notes

"It’s doing us all a disservice that he’s not including the fastest engine around in his benchmarks."

I have a lot of respect for Dean Edwards work so I tested base2 in the slickspeed environment on my local machine. It was not the fastest - generally was in 4th behind Ext, jQuery and dojo.query except in FF where it was last. It also had quite a few errors in IE7, as none of the attribute selectors worked.

Jack

Thanks for mentioning base2 Alex. I think it is probably the fastest engine overall (although Jack's is pretty formidable). It is also very accurate across all browsers as it has had years of testing in the form of cssQuery. I uploaded the slickspeed test suite so you can try it yourself:

http://base2.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/test/slickspeed/test.html

wild ...I didn't even know about Base2 (this is why I have your blog on my front page RSS radar.  keep the great info coming).  Also refreshing to see that you want to see the benchmarks to help drive faster speeds for all libs as a whole, not just Dojo. 
Dean, where is that version of base2? That is definitely a different version than the one I downloaded from your site.

When I run the tests on your new version, base2 is fastest in FF and Ext is faster in every other browser. Do you see different results?

Thanks, Jack

@Jack - the latest (dev) version of base2 is here:

http://base2.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/lib/base2-dom-fp.js

I recently updated base2 after adding back the XPathParser (that's why it is so fast on Firefox). base2 is still in development and is not "officially" released. I'm constantly updating the code before a full release.

I just run on Win32 and base2 was fastest for IE7, Opera 9, and Firefox 2. Ext was fastest for Safari 3. But I find that times can vary quite a lot TBH.

Your nth-child query still kicks my butt on IE7. I want to know your secret. :-)