Seems like Are We Fast Yet has spread around a bit, so I’d like to talk about it.

It started as a joke, suggested by Dave Mandelin, in the JavaScript “pit” at Mozilla. I made a site that displayed a giant “NO”, mounted a monitor where everyone could see it, and put the site on full-screen display. After a few hours everyone thought it was kind of depressing, so I made the “NO” small and added graphs.

The intent was for us to track our progress and notice regressions quickly. The UI is super minimalist and the terminology is internal. So after it started spreading, I’ve been getting tons of e-mails about how it could be improved.

What don’t people like? The data points don’t tell you any information, and the x-axis isn’t labeled. I fixed the data points last night, and the labels will come next.

People have also asked where Opera and IE are. I’ve put up a FAQ page to answer that. In short, respectively 1) it tests shell/console JS, not in-browser, and 2) everything runs off a Mac. I want to fix both of these eventually, but don’t have spare cycles right now. Improving perf is higher priority.

What do we look for on AWFY? Our goal is for the gray line (Jäger Only) to be as fast or faster than the competition. This puts Jäger+Tracing (purple line) at a greater advantage. The gray line should be moving fastest as that’s where the biggest gains are right now.

Anyway, I hope you like it!