September 28, 2007 at 12:05 am
Javascript on Safari is improved again. Quick benchmarks show generic Javascript performance to have improved ~25%, dom manipulation improved ~10%. It's better, but it's still not great. Fullscreen animations are still pretty unrealistic.
Performance in my game is a little better, but the primary performance bottleneck is still there. With iPhone Safari, a tap is not registered as input for a short amount of time, presumably to allow the user to double-tap to zoom in without accidently clicking on the element the user tapped. When the developer has disabled user scaling on their page, however, there's no reason to keep the delay around. However, since the delay is still present, the primary performance bottleneck in my game is the brief amount of time between when the user taps the screen and when his/her tap triggers an event.
One last note on Safari: the browsing experience is far, far smoother. The interface no longer hangs momentarily when scrolling into a part of a page that had not yet been rendered. Actually, the interface smoothness extends beyond Safari. Things like the password screen, Google Maps, and the home screen feel noticeably smoother.
I was one of the iPhone owners whose screen displayed the dot pattern. I just lived with it, having gotten used to seeing the same pattern on my Nintendo DS. This update fixed it. Blacks are blacker and true black is a flat color. The end result is that the display is even prettier than it was before. It's still second to the new iPod nano, in my opinion, when it comes to being the most incredible display I've ever seen, but it's an improvement.