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Which is the fastest JavaScript engine? Does it really matter?
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Bun - the new Javascript runtime has just announced its first beta release and makes the claimed that it's significantly faster than Node and Deno, not just a little bit faster, but orders of magnitude faster.
V8 is the fastest, because it compiles all JS to machine code. SpiderMonkey (what FF uses) is fast too, but compiles to an intermediate byte-code, not machine code.
V8 engine is the backbone of Google Chrome and other Chromium-based web browsers. V8 engine is distinct from other JS engines as it directly converts scripts to machine code without producing intermediate code. Edge service providers like StackPath use the V8 engine to provide better serverless scripting services.
V8 is Google's open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, written in C++. It is used in Chrome and in Node. js, among others. It implements ECMAScript and WebAssembly, and runs on Windows 7 or later, macOS 10.12+, and Linux systems that use x64, IA-32, ARM, or MIPS processors.
For production you generally don't need to care about which JavaScript engine is the fastest. Your page should work in all common browsers, period.
However, in certain projects where you are free to choose which browsers to support (such as hobby projects or projects for internal use), you'll find that the performance in different browsers varies a lot.
The two browsers I find to maintain top performance are Mozilla Firefox with its Spider Monkey engine and Google Chrome with its V8 engine. Apple Safari is also one of the fastest browsers with its Nitro engine, new in 4.0. They use new methods for "compiling" the scripts, making them perform much, much faster than before. In the future, more and more browsers will move towards this technology, as JavaScript is becoming one of the main technologies for interactive user content on the web. (I haven't mentioned Opera 10 here because I haven't personally tested it extensively, but I've heard it's faster at running JavaScript too.)
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Re: "does it matter?"
The performance of Javascript engines will become increasingly important as JS is used outside of the browser. There are now many scripts and programs, testing frameworks, even server-side web application frameworks, etc, running in JS engines outside of the browser.
Many of these currently run in Mozilla's Rhino engine but I expect an increasing number to be run in V8 as performance and support for various features (as well as the ability to run scripts without a JVM like Rhino requires) becomes an issue.
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