Heaton bi-annual Microsoft rant

Today Matt Heaton, President of BlueHost and HostMonster posted his bi-annual Microsoft rant. He picked up on some particularly fragile Microsoft comments.

Particularly this comment from IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch,

“We’re going to keep making the script engines faster (but) right now it’s not clear how many people are gated by script performance. JavaScript comprises a small portion of how fast a Web page will render. It is a piece, but by no means the holy grail.”

If he truly believes this then Internet Explorer isn’t in safe hands. Hachamovitch is living in the 90s focusing on rendering pure HTML pages built in Frontpage as quickly as possible. How can your focus not be on the Internet’s future? JavaScript is really leading the way in terms of interactive dynamic web applications.

Heaton, whose wiling to bet $10,000 against Hachamovitch stated in response,

“The reason web based applications are limited in scope and use is DIRECTLY related to javascript speed. The issue is no longer bandwidth or processing power, it is the javascript engine. There is a reason why Mozilla spends a great deal of time on TraceMonkey, and Apple on Nitro (Webkit), and Google on Chrome’s V8. They know that the JavaScript engine is what will drive the use of their browsers in the future.”

Is this some sort of technique to slow down the move from desktop applications (what Microsoft does best) to web applications? By not focusing on JavaScript aren’t they just impeding progress?