Slimmer and faster JavaScript strings in Firefox
<i>Linear-time indexing: operations like charAt require character indexing to be fast. We discussed solving this by adding a special flag to indicate all characters in the string are ASCII, so that we can still use O(1) indexing in this case. This scheme will only work for ASCII strings, though, so it’s a potential performance risk. An alternative is to have such operations inflate the string from UTF8 to TwoByte, but that’s also not ideal.</i><p>Perhaps I'm missing something (quite likely, as I am certainly no expert when it comes to unicode), but I was under the impression that this would already have to be the case since UTF16 is also variable length.