Il triste stato di JavaScript su Android

Jeff Atwood, lo sviluppatore di Discourse[1. Per alcuni mesi lo utilizzati su questo blog]:

It seems the Android manufacturers are more interested in slapping n slow CPU cores on a die than they are in producing very fast CPU cores. And this is quite punishing when it comes to JavaScript.

This is becoming more and more of a systemic problem in the Android ecosystem, one that will not go away in the next few years, and it may affect the future of Discourse, since we bet heavily on near-desktop JavaScript performance on mobile devices. That is clearly happening on iOS but it is quite disastrously the opposite on Android.

Chrome su desktop però mostra performance pari se non migliori di Safari. La ragione risiede piuttosto in Android, nel processore: il migliore device Android in circolazione ha una performance peggiore dell’iPhone 5.

Notava John Gruber, nella sua recensione dell’iPhone 6S:

Take a look at Geekbench’s aggregate results for Android devices. In terms of single-core performance, there isn’t a single Android phone that beats the two-year-old iPhone 5S. Android devices fare better in multi-core benchmarks, because they have more cores (some have eight, many have four — the iPhones 6S still have only two cores), but single-core performance is a better measure for the sort of things you can feel while using a device. Apple is literally years ahead of the industry.