Mozilla Unleashes JaegerMonkey Enabled Firefox 4 279
Posted
by
timothy
from the some-big-hype-to-live-up-to dept.
from the some-big-hype-to-live-up-to dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has published the first Firefox 4 build that integrates a new JavaScript engine that aims to match the performance in IE9 and reduces the gap to Safari, Opera and Chrome. This is really the big news we have been waiting for all along with Firefox 4 and it appears that the JavaScript performance is pretty dramatic and seems to beat IE9 at least as far as ConceivablyTech shows. Good to see Mozilla back in the game." The Mozilla blog gives a good overview of the improvements this brings; Tom's Hardware also covers the release.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares? You can't make a guess at answering that question? Okay I'll give you the answer: everyone but you.
Re:Kinda Sad (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Kinda Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the heck should anyone be sad? One of the reasons open source is so important to the industry is to prevent the state of the art in software from becoming moribund. Microsoft practically stopped working on IE once it had what it thought was an unbreakable monopoly on browsers. Imagine where we'd be today without Firefox and the Apache Group. It might be a world of IE6 browsers served from VB ASPs on IIS 5.
Even people who don't use F/OSS benefit from it.
Re:Kinda Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Last I checked both WebKitCore and V8 were faster than IE9 and were both open source (the former LGPL and the latter NewBSD). I don't think this is a FOSS vs. Proprietary thing, just a Mozilla vs. Everyone Else thing.
Re:Kinda Sad (Score:1, Insightful)
You're not making any sense. Firstly, Firefox isn't playing catchup as a browser just because it hasn't been a top JS performer in a while. (Was it ever? I don't recall it beating the Opera betas for any appreciable length of time.)
Secondly, the major parts of Chrome are FOSS, including IIRC the ECMAscript engine.
Thirdly, I'm not aware of IE9 actually being ahead in anything, now that Firefox has hardware accelerated graphics.
Yes, a commercial entity can indeed put together just a good a team of programmers as a random internet community. How is that in any way sad?
Re:Compatibility (Score:1, Insightful)
If they had stuck to real standards in the first place instead of offering "do not use this wink wink" nonstandard features.
The reason HT(X)ML advanced at all was because browsers implemented "wink wink" non-standards.
Remember CSS? That wasn't standard.
Re:anyone else (Score:1, Insightful)
Kinda surprising that someone around here doesn't get the difference between Javascript and Java.
Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox (Score:3, Insightful)
All browsers cry when they hit Idle. I don't think it's actually a code problem, I think everything cries at the sight of Idle.
Re:Kinda Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox (Score:1, Insightful)
That's not even punny..
Hyperbolic flamebait (Score:4, Insightful)
the only thing Firefox has going for it is adblock and the huge extension repository. Even then, its debatable
Apparently access to source code and the ability to be compiled and run on platforms like BSD and Solaris doesn't count for anything any more.
Re:In a Beta? (Score:3, Insightful)
What you say is in line with my traditional view of alpha/beta. I think you need to accept that it's a lot more complicated than that in large software projects. Often betas are released to get customer feedback. That's an important feedback loop if you really want to nail your scenarios. Sometimes you're simply missing something.
But in this case, yea, I'd tend to agree that a lot of features are landing late. If they were being stabilized and turned on by default, that would be a lot different. Oh well.
Re:Hyperbolic flamebait (Score:2, Insightful)
Apparently access to source code and the ability to be compiled and run on platforms like BSD and Solaris doesn't count for anything any more.
If you are one of the 97% of the web who doesn't care about this, yep, that's exactly right. This hardly makes it hyperbolic flamebait because Firefox contains 1 feature that you personally benefit from--all of the other features he mentioned are almost "must-haves" for mum and pops and their flash games.
You should be more interested in making the use of FOSS more widespread for good reasons; not the pretty fact that you can install it on whichever random OS you choose to run on your desktop.
Re:Who cares? (Score:1, Insightful)
I hate to break it to you but that's not very common.
To pedantically expand:
Who cares? Everybody except the exceedingly small segment of the Internet populace who does not now, and never ever will, use javascript extensively (either as a consumer or as a development).
Re:Hyperbolic flamebait (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it really doesn't, especially when 90% of the users are non-programmers who just want it to work.
Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox (Score:3, Insightful)