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As far as I know, asm.js is a strict subset of JavaScript -- I don't believe it's "browser-specific" in a meaningful way. Rather, it shows that it's possible to

As far as I know, asm.js is a strict subset of JavaScript -- I don't believe it's "browser-specific" in a meaningful way. Rather, it shows that it's possible to take a subset of JavaScript and make it run at near-native speeds, which means that there's still a lot of room left for the VMs to improve. From glancing at the benchmarks in the Ars article, it looks like asm.js generally runs around twice to four times as fast as the same code without asm.js-specific optimizations. This is a huge improvement, but it's not the difference between something being blazing fast in one browser and unusably slow in another.

ajuc 13y ago
In some applications it doesn't matter, in some it's crucial. If your game runs at 60 fps in firefox and 15 fps in other browsers, it's effectively firefox-only game. Additionaly browser games can't have main game loop (cause it would hang the browser infinitely), but often use "requestAnimationFrame" to trigger updates with the best sustained refresh rate available. Even if only one frame out of every 10 in your game is taking 20 ms instead of 16 ms - your game won't run with 60 fps anymore, but with 45 fps or 30 fps because browser is trying to choose refresh rate that will work. And that's a big difference in experience.