Thursday, July 07, 2005

How will AJAX change the landscape of browser platforms?

All this AJAX mania means we're going to be seeing a lot more long-lived single pages on the web, with users interacting indefinitely within a single web page. This means browser scripting engines are going to have to deal with more garbage collection, for one thing. I'm sure that to date, the interpreters bundled with browsers have been built with the implicit assumption that all scripts will be short-lived.

There are currently serious performance issues with web scripting. (This multi-browser experiment at quirksmode demonstrates a few of them. Joel Webber describes some more.) A single developer trying to make a robust web app in Javascript would be up a creek, but with huge industry pressure backed by the craze of an Internet fad, there's incentive for the platforms to change. I have no idea how they'll change, though.

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