This article strongly recommends that “everyone start using strict mode now.” It explains that strict mode makes debugging faster and easier by disallowing “some of the most common and egregious errors.” A few of the more obvious changes are reviewed. Don’t skip the comments section – it’s helpful, too.

This article comments on the 83 vulnerabilities that were patched in the March 12 Safari update, noting that 72 of them were critical. This represents a new record for Apple. Compatability, stability, and performance issues were also addressed. Safari’s JavaScript performance under Lion is better, but Apple has not stated how much better.

JavaScript vs. Dart vs. Harmony: Where to from here? This is a forward-thinking article about client-side scripting languages. The next version of ECMAScript is at the heart of these matters.

This article concisely describes five improvements in Firefox 11, which was released last week. Faster page loads is one of the five.

This article reviews the two-day, eight-hour JavaScript Masterclass course offered by Thomas Fuchs and Amy Hoy, and rates it as an 11 out of 3. The course focuses on Sprockets (a Ruby tool). This article provides well-explained reasons for the high rating.

This web page is an example of using async with ControlJS on a page that uses two external scripts and one internal script. It includes a waterfall chart and a brief analysis of the page’s load time. The page includes links to other similar examples.

Here are some of this week’s active JavaScript tests/measurements:

• different ways to see if an element belongs to a particular class
• JSFace vs. my.Class vs. John Resig’s class vs. Klass vs. Classy vs. PTClass
• for vs. while; body appends to document.body.innerHTML
• accessing this directly vs. accessing it through a named object
• using braces in an if vs. not using them (empty then clause)
• getElementById vs. querySelector
• appending to a div directly vs. via a newly-created fragment vs. via a detached element