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Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

"40-60fps on phones, tablets, PCs..." >klicks a button >site doesn't react for 2 minutes >laggy background animation >on i7 2.7GHz Laptop (AC adapter plugged in)

Either I'm missing something, or this is absolutely ridiculous. The performance problem is because of the abstraction level, we're too far away from the metal with DOM/JavaScript. This can't be solved with JavaScript.

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I would try a hard refresh, it's pretty snappy for me (stock Macbook Air and iPhone 5). It's always been really impressively performant, ever since I heard about it some months ago.

Reading this comment made me think the demo would be laggy on my already slow-almost-burning old 2008 Macbook (not pro). But it was very smooth here.

I'm assuming it compiles to native code on mobile.

BTW, I have a shit computer and the site ran smoothly for me.

It displays a completely different site on chrome than on firefox for some reason...

Maybe Firefox cant handle it?

It also doesn't render the 3D stuff in Internet Explorer. So i'm assuming their stuff is Webkit-only?

I don't think anything compiles to native code, from what I understand it's pure CSS3 (which, in the way they're using it, is rendered via the GPU).

Edit: it appears they have a native iOS version, but it's still buttery smooth in a mobile browser.

JavaScript compiles to native code.

Yes, I'm aware of that, but at soon as you interact with the DOM, a canvas, etc, you reintroduce all the overhead that you wanted to circumvent with compilation. And JavaScript without DOM interaction is rarely useful in a browser. For node.js, on the other hand, it sure is awesome. I didn't want to imply that JavaScript itself is necessarily slow, it isn't.

Well, DOM and the canvas elements empirically are somewhat slow, but there's no inherent reason that makes them slow. Besides, if we're talking about something like a game, you can draw the final output to the canvas at a single step which is not the bottleneck.

2GB, ADM Dual-Core C60, 1.333GH, on Linux, Chrome browser, no lag and smooth.

Chrome, Ubuntu, crap laptop. Snappy load and smooth animations, here...

Unusable on Chrome under Ubuntu on an 8 core xeon with 32GB of ram.

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