23 X Times More Performance: Google, Microsoft, Mozilla & Others Join Forces

Will co-develop a new binary format.

It’s nice to see tech giants that are usually competing with one another coming together to work on something that will benefit users all over the globe. The most recent example comes from a new announcement, which details the forthcoming partnership between Mozilla, Microsoft, WebKit engineers and others.

What is it all about? As you might know, when it comes to executing JavaScript files, browsers simply download them from a server, compile them using their own JavaScript engine and then execute. How exactly is this a problem? It is not but there is a ton of improvements that developers can make to speed everything up (such as Mozilla’s ASM.JS, Google’s NativeClient or Microsoft’s TypeScript). However, a newly joined “alliance” aims to make a new binary format called WebAssembly, which should merge all vendor’s efforts into a single compilation target.

What are some of the benefits? Ability to execute inside the JavaScript engine without having to parse the full code, convert everything to a binary format as well as offer developers a single compilation target, which will also become a web standard in the future. Most importantly, the most recent tests have shown that the web browser engines can decode the binary format by as much as 23 faster than even asjm.js code.

All in all, it looks like a pretty spectacular turn of events that we will be following closely.

[Via: TechCrunch]