Firefox 4 Will Be One Generation Ahead 341
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla's Chris Blizzard talks about the rising competition by Google Chrome, the evolution of the web platform and the prospects for WebM. He also promises that Firefox 4 will be 'one generation ahead' of other browsers in relation to Javascript speed."
One generation ahead? (Score:3, Interesting)
GPU Graphics Acceleration (Score:0, Interesting)
If Firefox for doesn't have GPU graphics acceleration it will be a generation behind Microsoft Internet Explorer.
All the Javascript speed in the world won't make up for last generation webpage rendering that nails the CPU while the GPU sits idle.
Do these guy get paid? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Mozilla's Chris Blizzard talks about...."
Do these guys get paid a salary? Or do they work for free?
Years Behind (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Javascript is dead (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, I Think You Mean Videos in That Format (Score:3, Interesting)
Nowhere. But right now it's the most widely adopted and implemented (pretty much everyone but Firefox either does or is planning to support it).
Huh, that's really confusing. Because according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Ogg Theora looks more supported in browsers than H.264. Perhaps you meant that there are more videos online in H.264 than Ogg Theora -- that goes without dispute.
... well, guess how long people would use IE if it suddenly didn't work with YouTube and currently Firefox, Chrome and Opera do support Ogg Theora. You want to see people migrate from IE to Chrome? Put up a big tutorial to install and use Chrome right in the little YouTube window for every video that won't load because it's in Ogg Theora.
On top of that, IE's H.264 is only implemented so far in a nightly build and not released.
But, come on, big players like Apple and Google have been pushing HTML 5 and if Ogg Theora gets accepted in the HTML 5 spec and H.264 doesn't
Someone's going to lose users and I don't think it'll be Google.
Re:...And one generation behind on HTML5 (Score:3, Interesting)
Just curious, given all these advances in JS speed, are there technical reasons why stuff like Python, Ruby and Perl aren't getting similar improvements in speed?
Re:...And one generation behind on HTML5 (Score:5, Interesting)
The awesome bar is one of two things I miss after switching to Chrome. Chrome tries to pack too much into the URL dropdown (search history, suggestions, etc) without doing any of it well. For instance on Firefox, I can type Q[tab] and have my comments page up. sl[tab] is slashdot. c[tab] is my bank site. f[tab] is the firehose journal search I use. Just about any site I go to is four keystrokes max counting hitting enter to load the site. On chrome, I have to type sl[right arrow]/[down arrow][right arrow] to get to my comments page. Note that moving the hand between the arrow keys and the main keyboard adds extra effort. If I don't add the /, Chrome lists only list two options: slashdot.org and search google for slashdot.org.
The other thing is Nuke Anything, which I can't find anything like it for Chrome. Useful for removing that floating div blocking the bottom right corner of every slashdot comments page.
Re:...And one generation behind on HTML5 (Score:3, Interesting)
Mozilla are working hard with browser performance. From startup performance [mozilla.org], I/O reduction [mozilla.org] to speed up some things, even a new caching system [mozilla.org]. I could name more, but you get the idea.
Re:...And one generation behind on HTML5 (Score:3, Interesting)
Yea, isn't the whole point behind Chrome that Google needed to improve Javascript speed and browser efficiency? I mean, they certainly aren't making money off it. Gaining information, maybe, but if _that_ was the goal, why open source it? My bet is they finally decided that they'd get more for their money by launching their own browser rather than spending that money on Mozilla. But still, improving browser speed is nothing but good for Google.
Re:...And one generation behind on HTML5 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:...And one generation behind on HTML5 (Score:4, Interesting)
The trouble is, a small lightweight browser isn't terribly useful for most people...
Most people will need additional features, different people will need different features, and you can either build these features in (meaning bloat as there will be features there you never use and its unlikely the default set of features would suit every niche) or you make the base extensible so people can install the extensions they need.
Re:...And one generation behind on HTML5 (Score:5, Interesting)
In the old days, JavaScript was interpreted. This means that the JavaScript engine is evaluating the program as it runs, instead of the CPU evaluating the program. This is what the Firefox SpiderMonkey engine does and it is slow.
When Chrome was released and there was a push to make things faster, Mozilla wrote an engine called TraceMonkey. This engine supports tracing jit, which is to say that the engine watches what javascript code gets executed (the tracing part) and uses that to produce optimised code that the CPU will execute (the jit -- or just-in-time compilation -- part).
Chrome's V8 engine, Apple's Nitro engine and others use what is called method jit. This means that the javascript code for a method (function) is compiled to code the CPU can execute when that method is called.
Mozilla are currently working on a similar method jit engine called JaegerMonkey. This engine is taking the nitro assembler (the code that generates the CPU instructions) and writing everything else on top of this. In addition, they are also taking the Yarr! regular expression engine that IIR, Chrome is using to speed up their regular expression handling.
Mozilla are looking to blend the method jit and tracing jit together -- hence the "one generation ahead" comment.
Mozilla are also optimising various javascript calls (a contrived example would be replacing calls to Math.sin with the sin CPU instruction) to provide "fast paths" that speed up code that uses those calls.
http://arewefastyet.com/ [arewefastyet.com] shows the performance of these over time.