Scripting is central to much of the web today. Almost all pages on commercial websites contain embedded scripts that conform to the new international 'ECMA' script standard, or one of the older standards, such as Netscape's JavaScript or Microsoft's JScript. (ECMA combines elements of both, and eventually will be the single standard for web scripting.)

Most ad banners, many search engines, some DHTML, and overall many, many elements of web sites are controlled by scripts: Scripting does matter.

In our scripting tests, scores are relative and indicate how many iterations of the tests your browser completed within the allotted time: higher scores are better. The lower limit is zero; there is no upper limit.

Of course, these scores reflect not only the strength (or weakness) of a browser's scripting engine, but also the CPU speed, the speed of the FPU and video systems, etc. Different machines will yield very different results; different browsers also will give hugely different results.

Still, when everything else is equal and the only variable is the browser itself, Netscape browsers typically take the lead in manipulating script-created windows and text, but tend to be slow on all other script operations. Conversely, MSIE is generally the fastest browser in most scripting operations except manipulating text and windows via scripts. Opera, though maturing fast, still has a very weak scripting engine and is extremely slow in almost all operations, compared to the others.

Your BT2K custom report shows you your actual score and also predicts approximately what your scores would be like if you used another browser.

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