From the Chromium blog, one of the more impressive performance improvements I’ve seen yet:
Ideally every part of a user’s interaction with a browser is fast, starting with loading web pages. Chrome is introducing two techniques called script streaming and code caching designed to reduce that painful waiting time spent staring at a white screen, especially on mobile devices.
Script streaming optimizes the parsing of JavaScript files. Previous versions of Chrome would download a script in full before beginning to parse it, which is a straightforward approach but doesn’t fully utilize the CPU while waiting for the download to complete. Starting in version 41, Chrome parses async and deferred scripts on a separate thread as soon as the download has begun. This means that parsing can complete just milliseconds after the download has finished, and results in pages loading as much as 10% faster. It’s particularly effective on large scripts and slow network connections.
They say they have more where this comes from too, and that’s pretty darn exciting. Alex Russell is on the Chrome team and was on the latest episode of Shop Talk — nice timing as he talks about performance on that episode.
