KaTeX – The fastest math typesetting library for the web

KaTeX is back in the spotlight after a commenter literally dragged it out of another thread and made it a headliner — thanks, suioir. The pitch is simple: a tool that makes math look beautiful on websites — fast, consistent across devices, no extra add‑ons, and even pre-renderable on servers (think: generate the math as plain HTML before you send the page). It leans on TeX, the classic standard, so your equations look print‑sharp.

Then the comments lit up. One camp cheered — “Super promising,” beamed northlondoner — while another arrived with speed guns and receipts. User s20n, who actually uses it on their blog, claimed MathJax 3 (a rival) “is now a bit faster” and even dropped a comparison link: intmath speed test. Cue the “Math Wars” memes. Is KaTeX the speed king, or is MathJax 3 quietly lapping it?

But the real salt came from holowoodman, who sighed that we shouldn’t need libraries at all — browsers should just support math natively (that’s MathML, a standard for showing math on web pages). Meanwhile, larodi went full spicy, dubbing KaTeX “powering the math inference revolution” and hinting that big AI players use it. So yes: speed flexing, standards lamenting, and bold AI name‑drops — all over how fast your fractions load. Delicious drama, zero decimals.