Probably were worried it would look like they're trying to shame their business partners (Apple and Microsoft I guess).

Actually it seems that the second worst in JavaScript (when executing their example) is Chrome?

User robko here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167078 measured the code on node.js, and node.js is based on Chrome's V8 and he measured 1.5 sec vs article author's of around 2.7s, so it would seem that robko has some almost twice as fast CPU, and the other two (fast) JavaScripts are under 500 ms, and the slowest is 8 seconds, so V8 of Chrome remains the only candidate for the second worst performing of their example.

I wish they had at east posted a browser-runnable version of their test so we could see for ourselves which browser is which, or compare JS vs WASM on our own systems. (On this type of code, I'd expect Safari to be the fastest, not Chrome.)

See my "minimal" C++ translation in my other post here. There's not much to add. For JavaScript start with their code, but add the allocation, just replace allocations with var a = new Uint32Array(height * width); and b the same. Add the timing (1), put in HTML and you're done. It's easy, just a few minutes for anybody who works with that (and this site should be filled with the competent developers AFAIK).

1) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Performance

They said it in the article:

>Note: Due to legal concerns, I won’t name any browsers in this article.

What legal concerns? Companies benchmark their competitors all the time.

Yep. It's complete bullshit and it's a shame to see cowardice corporate legal fearmongering like this in a company like Google, that was once at the same wavelength as the technical/hacker community. As if Firefox, Microsoft or Apple would sue them for publishing one browser benchmark.

Even worse if it were a pretext to not make Chrome look bad.

"Legal concerns" is a weird excuse, but personally, I'm glad they didn't name names. The point of this article isn't to shame any browser vendors, it's to talk about WebAssembly. Naming the browsers would have just distracted from the article's topic.

Would that be the explanation given it would be completely fine :)