>>in dumb interpreters unnecessary operations will slow down - so I took some out, benefit doubtful, as a smart compiler (Google V8 is a compiler)
>>should do that optimization as well.
>
>Thanks, it turned out the new Date() was CPU intensive. As I only have to initialize that once per refresh, it was moved out of the core function. Its millisecond equivalent was also moved out as this is tied to it.

thx for pointing out the culprit. If you could post the timings of your benchmarking matrix results for the different parts / different approaches / different Javascript implementations might help to get a better feel for those environments - Viv and myself suspecting innerHTML shows we need more info
;-)