You are wrong. The last line has the meaning of displaying the result to the user (you are supposed to implement it there, I'm lazy. The same goes for prior warm-up, I don't have to specify it here, I just show the loop). Because the result is needed to be shown, the browser is certainly not allowed to optimize away the calculation. Second, it's not allowed to replace it with a multiplication, as it's a floating point arithmetics and the binary representation of the constants involved is not "nice" an the same stands for partial results too. Do compare the result with the multiplication to get the idea (10000000.01 vs 9999999.99112945). All the additions have to be performed one way or another between the loading of the js and the displaying of the result. So it is a good measure of the quality of the translation from the js to the machine code which does the actual calculation and can also easily point to the unnecessary overheads as it's very simple. The regression I observed is therefore a real one, probably observable in other scenarios but harder to pinpoint and probably avoidable, as the better results did exist once. (Of course, if it would be part of some widely popular benchmark cheats would probably be developed, but at the moment there aren't any. Once anybody implements "we don't care for numerics" optimization, it of course should not be used anymore to asses the quality of JS).