April 6th, 2009

This lastest automatic widget release provides major speed improvements to the AddToAny drop-down smart menus, allowing your visitors to share, bookmark, and email your pages and subscribe to your RSS feed quicker than ever!

In profiling the latest sharing widget drop-down, tests yielded speeds of 70-80% faster than before in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Firefox 3.0 displays the drop-down 70% faster than the previous smart menu release.

Internet Explorer 8 clocks in at 80% faster than before.

Good ol’ Internet Explorer 6 receives the biggest benefit of the bunch.  Speed tests were again about 80% faster on paper, but it truly feels about fivefold faster after eliminating one peculiar IE6 bottleneck that was affecting the intentional order of functions and thus performance.

Not exactly to our surprise, the latest versions of Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera were seemingly untouched by the new changes.  By that we mean the original AddToAny widgets hardly phased these browser to begin with; users continue to enjoy instant functionality!

Venturing into technical jargon territory, this uncanny swiftness can no doubt be attributed to each browser’s high-performance JavaScript engines, Google’s V8, Apple’s Nitro (aka SquirrelFish Extreme), and Opera’s Carackan.  Unlike the other currently available browsers, these browsers feature native code generation and JIT compilation, which makes JavaScript blazing fast.  To be fair, the upcoming Firefox 3.1 wasn’t tested, but from trialing the 3.1 nightlies we’re confident that Mozilla’s TraceMonkey is going to contend nicely.

AddToAny is looking forward to the future of superfast web browsers, but in the meantime we’ll continue our ongoing support and improvement for these A-Grade browsers, and more, for as long as they are relevant.