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."

Nightly benchmarking

[Mr. Spontaneous]

For those of you who want to track the progress of Mozilla's JS efforts, visit the self-descriptive ARE WE FAST YET? [arewefastyet.com]

Re:Competition

[Keyslapper]

Agreed. The JS engine is probably the only area FF is trailing the rest of the market by a wide margin. It's not like they're announcing they're getting further out in front of the pack. Announcing they're finally coming up to par in this area is the best thing I've heard about FF since ... well ever.

This might give me reason to hold out for FF4 rather than switching to Safari or Opera.

Re:Free as in Beer

[bsDaemon]

It might be because they're free that there is competition to innovate. It doesn't take anything for someone to switch to a different browser, so getting them to stick with one is a bit trickier. No one is going to go into purchase rationalization mode over a free download like they might over a car that turns out not to be as cool as they hoped. From the perspective of a Microsoft or a Google, once you can lock in the loyalty of the end users, then its easier to steer them towards your other products, including for-pay products. Hell, even Netscape was giving away Navigator hoping people would pick up their server offerings to go along with it. Mozilla, on the other hand, needs to keep people in the open, standards-based ecosystem because that forces all the vendors towards the center and creates are more cross-compatible environment.

Too little, too late...

[divisionbyzero]

I dumped FF for Chrome a few months ago and I am not looking back... To be honest, the JS performance wasn't the main problem. It had stability and resource issues. We owe a lot to FF for freeing us from the tyranny of IE but the future is with Chrome or Safari (and to a lesser degree Opera).

Re:Competition

[maxume]

The 2008 auditing report and form 990 both use the calendar year, so there is a fair chance that they are using the calendar year for taxes.

It also mentions that the IRS is investigating their classification of certain income. It is sort of entertaining, their status as a public foundation is in question, so they have to ask people for donations (to try to be publicly supported), but they get far more money from their deal with Google than they are currently able to intelligently spend.

Re:Free as in Beer

[spinkham]

Exactly. Google wins if there's multiple high quality browsers.

Mozilla wins if there's multiple high quality browsers and Google keeps paying them.

Opera wins if companies continue to buy their browser engine for embedding, and Google keeps paying them.

That's 3 of the 5 major(if you can call Opera a major browser) projects that are almost entirely dependent on Google. Google ads fund the web.

Apple wins if the browsers on their platforms are good enough to allow you to leave Microsoft, and the web ecosystem allows you to not feel much pain. So they also win if there's multiple high quality browsers.

IE already won the last round. Now they have to keep from losing relevancy in the next. If people start seeing "the internets" as firefox or chrome vs IE, then people can much more easily leave Windows for Linux or Mac. The delay after IE 6 was an attempt to stall the web. They somewhat succeeded in delaying progress on the web, but lost the war, and now are scrambling to build a browser that doesn't suck.