TL;DR JSON used to be faster than alternatives in browsers, but that's not the case anymore. For performance sensitive web apps, it is worth considering Avro, Protobuf, or Bebop. Introduction Back in 2023, the company I was working for needed an alternative to JSON for large responses from the server to our Web App. We chose to use MessagePack primarily because it was convenient. During this process, I benchmarked a number of different binary encodings. To my surprise, I found that all of them w...