Comment I respect Adobe 100x more than them (Score 1) 98
You know what? If a page takes 200 milliseconds longer to run because JS performance isn't quite as fast who cares?
None of these browser speed wars addresses the problem that when I watch Hulu on machines that aren't top-of-the-line state-of-the-art, the video is jumpy often to the point of unwatchability.
My pipe is fat enough and the computers I'm using can do fullscreen video just fine. It's Flash, especially on Linux, that kills performance. Most video sites still use Flash, as do a lot of those fun little games, etc., and the only only alternative to Flash in most cases is to go without the site or functionality. Flash is what makes web browsing slow. Every other performance issue is like line noise in comparison.
Old times, when some company abandons/will abandon your computer/OS or you can't decide whether to join the herd (windows) or run linux/BSD, you always had Firefox at your mind. You would think it would have Firefox support and would run it one way or another.
Now, they dropped PowerPC binaries (because their cool looking addressbar not working) and speak about dropping anything below SSE3. Publicly that is...
Code is being infested by completely unportable x86 specific ASM to join cool kids with JS asm acceleration.
If they weren't afraid of Win32 users, they would drop X86 32bit in no time because 64bit runs 20% faster!" and they will have great fan feedback from idiots who have no clue about anything other than 64bit is faster.
Does Adobe support PowerPC? Yes they do. They have to do massive trickery on OS X (not hacks) but they do. Your Flash is probably slow because it doesn't do GPU decoding. If you use Linux, Adobe has a weird excuse. If you use OS X, they have a very good/justified excuse as Apple refused to add a central GPU decoding framework open to others (not private) until OS X 10.6.3. Running 10.5.8 on a production machine you can't update? Bad luck.