Mozilla Unleashes JaegerMonkey Enabled Firefox 4 279
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.
The Slashdot Firefox Paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot. For a heavily-commented article I switch to Chrome.
In a Beta? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox (Score:2, Interesting)
Ditto.
Plain text slashdot is the way to go. And I use Mozilla/SeaMonkey which seems to operate faster than Firefox, and has built-in Usenet support.
Kinda Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone else kinda sad that now Firefox is playing catchup. When no one cared about JS performance, the Open Source crowd was king, then all of a sudden big corporate money was poured into JS performance and now FOSS is lagging behind.
It seems that FOSS can't compete head to head with corporate backed projects, if the corporation actually cares. For example, MS didn't care about JS performance in IE6/IE7 and Firefox was king. Now, Microsoft is trying to compete in the browser space again and IE9 is catching up in features and exceeding Firefox in certain respects.
This is coming from a very long time Firefox user, but I have definitely switched to Chrome for general web browsing. I stick with Firefox for development though because of the large amount of niche plugins specifically tailored for development.
4.0b5 on Snow Leopard (Score:4, Interesting)
So far as I remember, this was an Apple issue not necessarily a Mozilla issue, but still disappointing.
Are We Fast Yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out http://arewefastyet.com/ [arewefastyet.com] to see the speeds of several JavaScript engines compared to Mozilla's.
Re:Kinda Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Big corporation and FOSS aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. I use Chromium on my Linux machines. It's open source, and it's blazing fast.
Re:Kinda Sad (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't Chrome open source? And isn't IE9 still unreleased?
Look, there's nothing wrong with Firefox. Performance improvements are lagging a bit behind Chrome, but obviously they're working on it. It's still a great browser.
Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are all great browsers, and they're all (at least to some extent) open source browsers. When a story comes out about how Firefox is preparing a new release with substantial performance improvements, I think you have to bend over backward to turn it into a sad anti-FOSS story.
Re:In a Beta? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a novel approach. Normally when *I* drink Jaeger all night, I end up shitting in the fucking shower in the morning.
Seriously. That stuff is like using a brass-bristle brush on the inside of your bowels and then using clamps to pry your asshole open to give the residue unimpeded egress.
Re:Back in the game? (Score:3, Interesting)
They're getting pretty close to matching chrome and safari: http://arewefastyet.com/ ... and getting there without breaking backwards compatibility horribly like chrome and safari have.
Re:Are We Fast Yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
OMG, all the 32bit Browsers beat the 64bit browsers!
Why did I bother for a 64Bit Windows 7 OS!
Re:Kinda Sad (Score:2, Interesting)
Commercial software vendors would have a hard time staying in business (and plenty didn't) if they couldn't stay ahead of F/OSS.
Re:Compatibility (Score:2, Interesting)
Firefox lagged chrome mostly because firefox cares a LOT more about compatibility, and adding all this crazy JIT compiled JS stuff is hard when you're trying to support all the introspection features which people have been using in firefox.
Firefox cares about compatibility [mozilla.org]? Are you kidding me? Reported: 2000-03-28
Doing a basic html element wrong for 10 years is not compatibility.
Re:Just one of the necessary features (Score:3, Interesting)
The point is that multiprocess, except for plugins (which is already done) isn't a big advantage at all.
They actually implemented it on Fennec, that's Firefox mobile if you prefer, because it would yield an advantage here.
On regular desktops, not so much, in fact, it uses quite some memory. It's not because "others do it" that it's necessarily "teh future embrace or die!".
It also encourage sloppy programming since it's more fault tolerant, chrome tabs crash all the damn time in comparison to firefox which barely ever crashes.
Non-plugin code should _never_ crash, ideally.
Re:Compatibility (Score:4, Interesting)
What's interesting about conformance tests is that unless they're exhaustive the only thing you can tell from them is how much a browser cares about conformance... by looking at the score when the test is first published, before people go and fix just the issues that are tested for.
As far as I know Opera is not "cheating" on its sputnik results but is in fact "cheating" (in the effect of implementing effectively bare-minimum functionality needed to pass) on some of the Acid3 bits. Precisely the ones Firefox is not passing, as it happens.