I think we can fairly credit Chrome with dramatically raising the bar for javascript performance across the competing browser engines. The V8 virtual machine fo

I think we can fairly credit Chrome with dramatically raising the bar for javascript performance across the competing browser engines. The V8 virtual machine for Chrome compiles JS to machine code rather than interpreting it or running in bytecode. Mozilla has since responded with the TraceMonkey optimization for its javascript engine; WebKit developed SquirrelFish Extreme; and so on.