While working on my site redesign for Gameslate, I’ve realized an interesting tidbit: All of the new, recently released browser versions are significantly faster, especially with JavaScript.

I’d kinda already noticed this when I installed Firefox 3.5, which was a huge improvement over 3.0, but what I hadn’t known was that the same has been true with IE 8 (much faster than IE 7) and development versions of Chrome. Safari will probably soon follow, but it’s pretty fast already. I don’t know about Opera, but generally there are widesweeping speed and stability improvements across the board.

It’s not some magical boost to your Internet connection, it’s just that these browsers are faster at working out how pages should be displayed. Given the rise in JavaScript usage with web applications / AJAX / etc., the performance improvement really helps.

Of course, I’m biased. I’d like to see people upgrade regardless. At least get rid of the truly crappy old browsers (IE5, IE6, IE7 all seriously suck to support). But even if you’re not interested in the coolness factors of CSS3, HTML 5 (dev), etc., I think upgrading is worthwhile.