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:Competition

[Monkeedude1212]

Please elaborate Why not?

Free as in Beer

[DIplomatic]

It really blows my mind that there is such fierce competition between internet browsers. It's rare to see this level of intense drive and innovation for a free product.

Re:Competition

[BZ]

Mozilla is not just open source, it's also open. Open in the sense that all project management (and indeed everything else) is done in the open as much as possible. There are no secret project crash landings of the sort that Chrome was or the current iteration of the Safari JS engine, unless there are external requirements for such (as there were with WebM).

This has the benefit that project contributors who are not Mozilla employees can fully participate in goal-setting and development. It does have the drawback that competitors can borrow the ideas, and possibly even ship them first; this happens all the time. This is viewed as an acceptable cost of doing business in an open way.

Re:Competition

[ultranova]

Nah. The best thing would be if they finally separated everything into their own threads so that the entire UI would not lock just because Javascript in some tab is busy, or some download stalled, or a big table is being rendered, or whatever.

Too bad FF may not last

[denis-The-menace]

Don't get me wrong, I love FF but I am worried about what happens after the deal with google expires.

FF doesn't put out an MSI version of their windows package and doesn't do GPO policies *natively*. This stuff is all 3rd party after the fact and FF updates.

Meanwhile I read on /. that Chrome can use the same GPO as IE natively. (I can't find it, though)

Once Google pumps out MSIs for Chrome and its GPO support is common knowledge, FF will have lost the corps for market share.

Wha?

[ITBurnout]

Sometimes when reading Slashdot I find myself taking a step back and marveling at how a sentence like "Mozilla's new Jaegermonkey Javascript engine for Firefox, which will launch on September 1, is faster than Tracemonkey in key benchmarks" actually makes sense to me. It is the 21st Century, and we talk funny.

Re:Competition

[marsu_k]

While this is true, partially it's not FFs fault. However /. managed to get from a convoulted mess of nested tables and font tags to a convoulted mess of some of the worst performing javacript I've ever seen is beyond me.