Infrequently Noted

Stefan K. has posted a fascinating run-down of mobile browser performance with regards to JavaScript toolkits. No big shock, but Dojo once again brings home the bacon. I'd love to see these tests re-run with TaskSpeed instead of SlickSpeed, but when you're doing progressive enhancement it turns out that selector engine performance really matters. Dojo continues to do very well in both TaskSpeed and SlickSpeed because the Acme selector engine is so darned fast. In the real world, selector speed matters and the faster it gets, the more queries we seem to do.

I'm not entirely sold that the right solution going forward is to use the toolkits we already have, but if you're building a mobile app today and you're going to use a toolkit, it looks like (as on desktop browsers), Dojo should be your first choice. The webkitMobile variant of Dojo points to one possible way out of the "what to do about mobile?" conundrum regarding size and IE-induced bloat, but I have some hope that WebKit will improve quickly enough to make the toolkits of today obsolete on mobile phones entirely. Time will tell.

Hat tip: the Uxebu blog