JavaScript Performance on iPhone OS 3.0

A few weeks before the iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0 shipped last summer, the WebKit team announced their new hot-rodded JavaScript engine — then called SquirrelFish, now renamed Nitro. WebKit performance was dramatically improved in iPhone OS 2.0, both for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution, but the new SquirrelFish/Nitro JavaScript engine was far too new to be included yet. I.e. the significant JavaScript improvements were yet to come. I published a piece on this that included a simple recursion depth test to indicate whether a JavaScript interpreter might be Nitro.

Wayne Pan has braved the NDA waters and published JavaScript benchmarks for iPhone OS 3.0, and they are impressive — with results ranging between 3× and 10× faster than iPhone OS 2.2. And I’ll confirm that MobileSafari on iPhone OS 3.0 passes my simple “could be Nitro” recursion depth test.

In short, JavaScript performance on iPhone OS 3 is way faster.

★ Thursday, 26 March 2009