Mozilla's New JavaScript Engine Coming September 1

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has reached an important milestone as its new JavaScript engine, 'JaegerMonkey,' is now faster than the current 'TraceMonkey' in a key benchmark. Mozilla wants JaegerMonkey to be faster than the competition and launch on September 1, which means that JaegerMonkey will make it into Firefox 4.0."

Re:JägerMonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

The correct transliteration of German umlauts ä, ö and ü is "ae", "oe" and "ue". JaegerMonkey is correct.

Re:Free as in Beer

[BZ]

> it is merely the means to generate the real product: users.

No, the real product is an open web not tied to a particular technology. Users are just a means to that end.

> and their habits are sold to the advertisers.

What does Firefox sell, exactly? I'd really like to know.

> that money comes from selling user behavior.

Not quite. That money comes from partnerships with search engines. The only thing "sold" is whatever you decide to submit to a search engine, and only if you use the little search bar at the top right of the browser, iirc, and is only "sold" to the search engine provider (who is obviously getting that data anyway; you want them to have it so as to actually do the search).

Re:Great... JUST GREAT

[Anonymous Coward]

> Drunk monkeys

"Jaeger" is German for hunter. Yes, there's also a drink that has this name.

Re:Free as in Beer

[BZ]

> But there will be no winner.

No winner in terms of market share, right?

If that happens, it's a win for Mozilla, at least, since their goal here is a free and open web, not controlling how users get information. Firefox having 100% market share would be a loss for Mozilla....

Re:JägerMonkey

[shellster_dude]

Actually Mozilla uses the same terminology. See any of the data points on the graphs located at the Mozilla run: http://www.arewefastyet.com/ [arewefastyet.com]

Re:Keyword: fast*ER* ... sometimes

[sd.fhasldff]

I think you're missing the point of what is being benchmarked. Mozilla hasn't released benchmarks of their new JS engine with both "method" and "tracer" JIT combined. They are being evolved separately, but are (according to Moz) complementary. Thus, we don't know how far they actually are from their goal yet.

Check out http://www.arewefastyet.com/ [arewefastyet.com] for benchmarks and description.

From what I can gather from the associated bug report, the "fatval" optimizations are also not applied to the portions of JS code that is traced... which would imply that the better job the tracer engine does, the less the "fatval" optimizations are applied.

The result is that an unknown "free" speed increase is waiting in the wings. What the magnitude of this increase is... well, that's the question, isn't it?

Does 1 September seem like a really tight deadline? Yes, sure does, but more in terms of stability and robustness than actually getting to a specific speed milestone.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Competition

[Keyslapper]

I was under the impression that's what 4.0 is doing. On MacOS, I get an extra FF icon in the Dock when I run into sites with Flash ...

Did I miss something?

And yeah, 3.6.x was so bad I upgraded my primary browser to the beta. Since then, no CPU drain at random, no out of control heat issue until I force kill it, and no framework lockup when I'm editing a long response on FB. It still freezes the edit box momentarily, but only rarely, and never crashes out or kills performance on the whole machine. To be honest, if the handful of extensions I use in FF had been ported to Safari, I'd already have jumped ship.

Re:Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash et al are in their own processes. But despite it's multi-threading claims, FF still uses one big thread for UI and javaScript. So when loading /. the entire UI freezes until the js is done. This is quite obvious if you have a /. live book mark. Try to open 5 stories quickly using middle-click (open in new background tab for me).

Re:Competition

[BZ]

Which part? Exact sources of revenue? Those are as open as the various revenue sources will allow, last I checked. Exact spending? The general categories are published; the exact salaries of particular people are not. Something else?

Re:Too bad FF may not last

[RebelWebmaster]

For what it's worth, there was a session on enterprise deployment at the 2010 Mozilla Summit last week. Official MSI support is coming (there are patches posted to the relevant bug), hopefully for Firefox 4. GPO support is more difficult due to the wide number of settings supported by Firefox and complications with their version numbering and update settings. That said, there are extensions for it at least. Basically, that segment is getting more attention, even if it isn't moving at lightning speed.

Re:JägerMonkey

[Kenshin]

"Jäger" is German for "Hunter".

Once again we're treading into the territory: Can you be sued for using a word?

Re:Competition

[BZ]

> Where is such information?

On the page you linked to.

> The information here is getting stale:

The 2008 information is there. The 2009 information can't be put up until the 2009 tax returns are filed, at the very least, which may well not have happened yet (depending on the exact fiscal year and extension situation; I'm not privy to the details).

Re:Keyword: fast*ER* ... sometimes

[bunratty]

The tracer JIT is able to compile most methods into very tight assembly code because it is able to determine the types of each variable at compile time. For the methods that can't be compiled with the tracer JIT, they have been run by the interpreter, which is very slow compared to JIT compilers. With the new method JIT, methods that can't be compiled with the tracer JIT will be run by the method JIT instead of the interpreter. This is the meaning of the statement the tracer JIT (orange) and method JIT (black) are not yet integrated. once integrated, the merged branch will be faster than either branch individually. they are complementary. [arewefastyet.com]

Re:JägerMonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only is it the correct transliteration, but it's the original form which was shortened [wikipedia.org] over time.

Re:Too little, too late...

[SuseLover]

People keep posting that FF is unstable, but I don't get it? FF itself has almost NEVER crashed on me and I let it run 24x7x365. All of my instability problems have been due to plugins.

And I don't understand the performance complaints either, FF is maybe .5 - 1 second behind other browsers loading pages/apps. Is our society really that impatient that we can't be bothered to wait 500ms longer for something to happen?

I dumped all other browsers since Mozilla came out and I haven't looked back and I absolutely HATE Chrome (and Google - I think they strayed too far from their roots and are too powerful), so whats so damn great about Chrome other than being a little faster?