By now you have heard of Chrome, Google’s browser that is set to break JavaScript rendering speeds. There’s plenty of articles on the web about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Chrome; so I won’t get into that. However, Microsoft seems to have been shaken up slightly - in another area than browser wars.

This article from CNET called Chrome’s JavaScript challenge to Silverlight gives a quick insight into what Microsoft is thinking. Silverlight is Microsoft’s Flash “killer” and it has been gaining momentum in the past couple of years. One of the features that Chrome set out to do was to make JavaScript rendering faster than in other browsers (and in the process making all Google Apps faster). Here is some proof that Google is on its way to achieving that. Well, now that we have faster and faster JavaScript, what’s going to happen to Flash and Silverlight? If JavaScript is faster than Silverlight, maybe that will become the programming framework of choice. That is what Microsoft’s Silverlight team is getting anxious about.

Joel Spolsky had a good post (”Strategy Letter VI”) relating to this about half a year ago. In a section of his post he said, as time goes on, technology will only get better and faster. This is what I interpreted from it: JavaScript may be “slow” now, but that doesn’t mean you should limit yourself to technologies that are fast today. Build your software the way you WANT it to be, and the speed of the technology will catch up. By that time you will have developed your super-cool application, while everybody else will be re-coding their old applications to use the full capabilities of the new speeds.

And here we are. Chrome is out, setting new speeds for rendering AJAX; and Silverlight has met a new competitor.