Coach Wei has updated Razor Optimizer, "a JavaScript optimization tool for reducing code footprint and increasing runtime performnace. As a cross-browser web application itself, Razor Optimizer can be access either online as a service, or to be downloaded to run locally.

Steve Souders posted on Runtime Page Optimizer a tool that you can think of as a performance proxy. It sits on the server side, and cleans up content before it is sent back to the browser.

What can it do? Steve let us know:

Ars Technica has a new columnist, John Resig. His first piece is on Extreme JavaScript Performance which has started to come to us in abundance recently!

His article focuses on the latest updates to the fish, SquirrelFish Extreme:

Based on its performance on the regexes it does handle, WREC (WebKit Regular Expression Compiler) is indeed an awesome design. regexp-dna.js, however, is flawed and exaggerates SFX performance.

We could use nanojit to make a regex compiler for SpiderMonkey that would perform as well as WREC. But I don’t know if it’s worthwhile yet. Regex performance is much less important for today’s web than it is for SunSpider–I hope to link to a report on that in a future post.

Steve Souders is launching Hammerhead today at The Ajax Experience.

We've heard a lot about optimizing CSS, HTML and JavaScript but one thing that is less talked about is how much extra information image editors put into image files. You might think you've done a great job optimizing your GIFs, PNGs and JPGs while still keeping them visually pleasing but when you use a text editor you'll realize that there is quite a big amount of data you can save by removing information about the image editor used, the date the file was edited last and lots of other bits that really are redundant.

While Ben and I were talking about JavaScript performance (and other things) at Web 2.0 Expo NYC, Maciej Stachowiak announced SquirrelFish Extreme, the very new and improved version that appears to do very well at SunSpider:

SquirrelFish Extreme:	943.3 ms
V8: 1280.6 ms
TraceMonkey: 1464.6 ms

What makes it so fast?

Brendan Eich jumped right in and benchmarked the tip of tree for TraceMonkey, with the V8 version that came with Google Chrome:

We win on the bit-banging, string, and regular expression benchmarks. We are around 4x faster at the SunSpider micro-benchmarks than V8.

Patrick Meenan has setup an IE7 instance in Virginia that we can poke to do an AOL Page Test.

You give it a URL and some options such as the number of runs, whether to see the first and repeat views, and off it runs.