Jack Slocum of Ext fame recently posted a comparison of CSS Selector speeds among different JavaScript libraries. The results are pretty impressive. Looks like performance is starting to become the foremost concern among the different libraries. The librariesin question are – Ext, jQuery, Dojo, Mootools, Prototype.
You can view the post here.
But why all the spotlight on CSS selectors only? What about other aspects of JavaScript like text metrics, element manipulation, event management, problem of memory leaking, state management, etc. There are no good comparisons on these lines, maybe because not all libraries support these features.
Anyways, according to the tests Opera seems to outperform other browsers, and Ext seems to outperform other libraries by a fair margin. But one could easily say that the results are tainted as they come from Jack himself. If that is the case, you can always run the tests yourself. Navigate here.
These libraries are doing their bit, but with the present incompatibilities among browsers and slow rendering of JavaScript, it is nearly impossible to push the performance any further. Its true that they keep on raising the bar, but the saturation point seems to be quite near.
