Mozilla's New JavaScript Engine Coming September 1 222
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."
Competition (Score:5, Funny)
I know Firefox is open source, but is it wise to broadcast their intentions so publicly months in advance? Especially when it has to do with competing against other browsers.
Re:Competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Please elaborate Why not?
Re:Competition (Score:5, Funny)
Because the Taliban might start training their monkeys to interpret Javascript, too.
Re:Competition (Score:5, Funny)
The new and improved TalibanMonkey Javascript engine! It flies code into large webpages and DDOSes any script that mentions Muhamad. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget the IBSOD (Improvised Blue Screens Of Death).
Re:Competition (Score:5, Funny)
You're thinking of AlQuedaMonkey. TalibanMonkey tally me bananas.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You sir, made my day, and in lieu of a mod point, have this coupon, good for one free internets!
damn, if only i hadnt pissed away my mod points earlier today..
Re:Competition (Score:5, Funny)
It's not exactly a huge leap of innovation, since monkeys already writing Javascript.
I can't explain some of the code I've seen, otherwise.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, monkeys writing Javascript can lead to huge leaps of innovation.
Re:Competition (Score:5, Funny)
Because the Taliban might start training their monkeys to interpret Javascript, too.
Silence, I kill you!
Re: (Score:2)
Nice reference, altho I think rather niche. Ah well.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, first time I ever see that:
---
Google Error
Server Error
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds.
---
You've actually managed to slashdot YouTube with your link!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The engine has already been created - and tested, it is faster than their current engine.
Yes, they hope to beat the best, and of course thats just marketting speak like all browsers do, but it's not like Firefox has set any goals and felt any backlash when they didn't meet them before.
Re: (Score:2)
Everybody is trying to improve their Javascript execution speed, so it's really not a big slip. Really, you can't blame them, after all, it lets you play Javascript games like Game! [wittyrpg.com] that much faster!
Re:Competition (Score:5, Interesting)
This might give me reason to hold out for FF4 rather than switching to Safari or Opera.
Re:Competition (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Competition (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Competition (Score:4, Funny)
And yet here you are posting!
At least the trains ran on time in Italy eh?
Re: (Score:2)
If a Net facing application, which is meant to process data acquired from untrusted sources freezes because it's fed bad data, it's entirely that application's fault. I don't care if Slashdot was coded by the Devil himself, if Firefox freezes on Slashdot then Firefox has a bug.
Not that I w
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot is about the only site that I can watch max-out the processor for up minutes at a time on my N900.
For a geek website this is REALLY bad. IMHO.
But I do think that we can all agree that (Score:2)
Firefox is falling behind on version numbers and it is 100% it's own fault. If this continues, it is not going to be able to compete with Chrome 5.0, Safari 5, Internet Explorer 9, or Opera 10.
Maybe Firefox should name their next version Firefox 1080?
Re: (Score:2)
nope they have to go through all iterations
should release b1, b2, etc as full blown versions like others!
Re: (Score:2)
If they call it Firefox 1080 then I won't be able to use it. My monitor is only 1280x1024.
Re: (Score:2)
Firefox 4 also puts the JS engine in its own thread.
Re: (Score:2)
I’m sorry, but that’s your own damn fault.
The thing is, that modern JS has stopped assuming that its users are complete retards, because as you may know, this did not work out so well.
So it leaves you the choice how the threading works, by just offering worker threads as a tool, and not enforcing them.
(Even before that, there were always setTimeout and setInterval, which I used to simulate asynchronous network sockets over object tags in what, 2002?)
But if you don’t use them, of course the
Re: (Score:2)
There are indeed some severe flaws in the current Firefox, but what makes you think that the entire codebase needs to be discarded? There are still some issues with the current development process -for example, standards don't seem to have been Job One for some time- but in general they seem to have good plans for fixing most of the issues, and IE9 looks like it may be able to shame the dev team into doing the rest if it can follow through with its Acid3 support and leave Firefox as the last browser not at
Re: (Score:2)
> for example, standards don't seem to have been Job One for some time
Standards have in fact been Job One, but the nice thing with standards is that there are so many to choose from. If you don't have the resources to implement them all, or think some of them are actively bad for the web (P3P comes to mind), you don't implement them. See also http://dbaron.org/log/2006-08#e20060818a [dbaron.org]
For the specific thing keeping Mozilla from a 100/100 score on Acid3, see http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010 [mozillazine.org]
Re: (Score:2)
the reason ff is not at 100/100 is purely ideological, they don't want to implement features they consider are wrong (2 of them if i recall correctly, svg font rendering and some other crap.. maybe 3!)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The only way that they could really hide from a remotely sophisticated adversary(ie. a group that includes anybody remotely capable of making a competing browser), would be to sacrifice openness in a pretty huge way and make it so that only internal devs could s
Re:Competition (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
> 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: (Score:2, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Sort of. There have been several projects developed behind closed doors and then crash-landed in Webkit when done. In fact, that's happened with Safari's JS engine.
September 1 (Score:2)
Free as in Beer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, the same argument that is used against Google could be leveled against Firefox. The browser/search is not the product, it is merely the means to generate the real product: users. The users are the product and they and their habits are sold to the advertisers. Obviously Firefox is still largely community driven, but when you get down to brass tacks it takes money to run a project as large and complex as Firefox has become, that money comes from selling user behavior.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> 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
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nope.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> Actually, I thought FF sold competition vs IE to Google.
FF doesn't "sell" anything to Google. Google pays for any searches that are done on Google via the FF search bar. So do other search providers.
> With Chrome the future of FF looks bleak when contract renewal comes up.
Does it? Google has search deals with FF and Opera. Why does Chrome change that calculation?
Google is not in the business of building a browser to build a browser. They're in the business of selling advertising; everything els
Re: (Score:2)
Google has Mozilla Corp. between a rock and a hard place.
Google could say "Hey, we're not going to pay you for referrals any more."
What do you think is going to happen? That Mozilla will remove Google from the search engine dropdown? That Mozilla Corp will promote the #2 search engine instead, which just so happens to be owned by their largest competitor, Microsoft?
More importantly, if they do either of those things, how do you think the users will react?
Re: (Score:2)
> That Mozilla will remove Google from the search engine dropdown?
Presumably not, since it's there because it's the search engine users want, not because of the money.
Note that in some locales, where Google gives worse results than other search engines, it's not the default search engine.
Now your point seems to be that if Google were to do this then Mozilla would lose revenue. This is probably true.
Re: (Score:2)
the users will change the search engine to their fav again? That's not so different than IE 7.
Re: (Score:2)
If I were IBM, I'd donate some money to keep Mozilla going. The more choices there are the more likely some CxO is going to just pay IBM to not have to think about them
Re: (Score:2)
Google won't do that unless Firefox disappears from the charts. Google isn't interested in promoting Chrome, it's interested in promoting their search engine that shows their ads. Cutting Mozilla's money would probably give some competitor (Yahoo?) the opportunity of serving web searches for all the Firefox users, which are still buttloads more than Chrome.
Re:Free as in Beer (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that in this case, it's free as in Jägermeister.
There are a number of reasons why that's a terrible idea. Remind me to tell you some time about that night in Augsburg back in 1986. I hear they still won't let Americans stay in that hotel.
Re: (Score:2)
There isn’t. It’s just that some idiots would not have all those extreme stories without making it into “TeH FIGHTZ0RZ oF TeH CeNtUrIeZ!!!11!1one(lim (x->0) ((sin x)/x))”
Re: (Score:2)
The market is fluid and we should all be thankful for that even if it bursts our fanboy bubbles.
Re:Free as in Beer (Score:4, Informative)
> 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:Free as in Beer (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
> Google wins if there's multiple high quality browsers.
Do they? They win if people visit Google properties. Whether that needs multiple high quality browsers is debatable. It probably does need _a_ high quality browser.
> Mozilla wins if there's multiple high quality browsers and Google keeps paying them.
Why is the Google part there a necessity? Mozilla wins (per their mission) if they can prevent a single entity from restricting what people can do on the web or how they use the web, whether that
Re: (Score:2)
Great... JUST GREAT (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, some of us are not drunk.... all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
nazi drunk monkeys (sorry lol)
Re: (Score:2)
Professional hunting monkeys sounded scarier then drunk monkeys - also, drunk monkeys are funnier. Also, EITHER is better than IE.
Indeed. I'd rather browse the web with a pack of drunken armed monkeys in the room than have to use IE.
Nightly benchmarking (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hovering over a datapoint should show which engine is being tested.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In addition to what the above poster said, they aren't putting all of their eggs in one basket. They've been heavily focused on making sure the entire UX is fast/responsive, not just benchmarks.
Re: (Score:2)
Keyword: fast*ER* ... sometimes (Score:2)
Re:Keyword: fast*ER* ... sometimes (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Too bad FF may not last (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Too bad FF may not last (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, I love FF but I am worried about what happens after the deal with google expires.
Realistically, it won't expire anytime in the foreseeable future. Google is very happy about the deal with Firefox - they get put as the default search engine for 25% of web users. If that translates into any positive amount of search share - and it does - then Google won't stop the deal with Mozilla.
The Google-Mozilla deal isn't charity from Google. It helps them to compete with their actual competitors - Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
I doubt that ever happen. Google gains money from this deal and Firefox market share is still huge and way above Chrome
Not only that, but even if Firefox had a smaller market share, Google would still keep the contract like they do with Opera
Finally, Google has been pretty much "non-evil" lately, I wouldn't see them do that, they've good relations to Mozilla, and they don't gain much by having Chrome "beat" Firefox. But the future will eventually tell.
Wha? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Quite obviously you don't work in a Unix/Linux environment. Grok, grep, apt-get, rpm -ihv name.rpm, su, man (which has nothing to do with a man), cat (which has nothing to do with cats), tar (which has nothing to do with tar and feathering someone or the LaBrea Tar Pits), or chmod.
I think you'll find people have been talking funny for centuries, depending on what your definition of funny is.
Re: (Score:2)
But of course we talk funny! All the good product/project names (i.e., which actually make sense) have already been taken, by copyrighting, trademarking, or otherwise.
Too little, too late... (Score:3, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's interesting that no one seems to be able to provide specific information on these supposed stability and resource issues. It's classic FUD [wikipedia.org].
I am sorry. I wish it were but the only FUD around here is your reply to my post. FF's problems are what are known as facts [wikipedia.org]. I'd post screenshots of resource utilization, etc, but rebutting your comment is not worth the effort because it is patently false. FF's continual decline in market share speak for itself.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Err, that's just more FUD ...
You want non-factual stuff ? (Actually that's true at least for me)
Chrome itself doesn't crash, but the tabs crash all the fucking time that's so damn annoying. Firefox doesn't do that. It rarely ever crash (unless you're using Minefield?). Doesn't even use as much memory as Chrome also.
Windows 7 64.
For me the choice is easy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, it's clear you're making it all up. Many [arstechnica.com] tests [dotnetperls.com] show [pavlov.net] Firefox [lifehacker.com] uses [lessthandot.com] less [avencius.nl] memory than other browsers, and Firefox's usage has never significantly declined [wikipedia.org]. Your post is purely fabrications.
Ok, have fun in fairy tale land... I'll stick with Chrome.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. Chrome and Safari are both much more likely to have stability issues on both Mac and Windows, as far as I have seen. Safari 5 is a nice browser, but should be labeled beta. Chrome has an amazing Javascript engine, but the rest of the browser is mediocre (rendering of complicated HTML is significantly slower than Firefox, for example - just try scrolling to see it, or look at some non-Javascript benchmarks).
Resource utilization hasn't been an issue with Firefox in *years*. This was a problem with
Re: (Score:2)
When (if, but it seems likely lately) mozilla will beat everyone at the javascript game i bet they'll say javascript performance isnt all that important (its true it's not all that important) ;p
AREWEFASTYET? (Score:2)
http://arewefastyet.com/ [arewefastyet.com]
NO.
(But it's getting good! - that Firefox javascript engine performance day-to-day or almost performance improvement graph)
Will it support 64-bit? (Score:2)
Will it be enabled on 64-bit systems? I've been missing out on all of these speed improvements over the last several years because I use 64-bit Linux with 64-bit Firefox and the new javascript engines have only been enabled for 32-bit Firefox.
Re: (Score:2)
yes it runs on 64 bit (RTFA ! ;D)
it's faster, too
Mozilla is dead as a user browser (Score:2, Troll)
Okay, obviously not, its got its fair share of the market.
My thought here is however, instead of working on things that aren't really that important, how about they step back and focus on making Firefox not suck.
You know, like back when it was simple and didn't try to be the worlds browser testbed?
I embed Gecko in a couple applications, using it because I get a 'web' rendering engine (lets face it, HTML isn't enough anymore) AND XUL which means I can create a common GUI using XUL and not maintain different
Using the wrong benchmark... (Score:3, Funny)
The speed of Javascript is the *least* of my critera to use in judging a browser (seems like reviewers and developers are operating under some misguided credo where "foreign" software providers running unexamined software ON MY MACHINE is a *good* thing. While open source, an Internet site is free to change their Javascripts at the drop of a hat (unlike an open source browser where one at least some has some community review and reasonable confidence in security/reliability). So any web site which uses Javascript is open to compromise and therefore could become a mal-Javascript distributor.
If the purpose of HTML and Standards is to distribute *information* and not to use *my* CPU cycles or sell me things (aka distribute commercials) I'd be much more interested in browsers that use the fewest CPU cycles in an unused state (or a "used" state displaying static HTML) or reliably restore sessions when requested.
The overemphasis on how fast Javascript runs seems to be due to a lack of serious thought as to how to make browsers better at doing what they were designed to do -- which was *not* to run "web-apps". We used the Internet very successfully for over a decade to provide information -- not to run apps -- if it wasn't (isn't) broken why the emphasis on fixing(?) it?
I note this with an aside that the U.S. Government (NIH NCBI) no longer allows complete access to its *public* databases, e.g. PubMed, by browsers which do not have Javascript enabled. (One is compelled to ask *who* for the most part paid for that information but can no longer access it?).
A "good idea" is something which doesn't break something which used to work just fine when it is supposed to be improving on it.
Re:JägerMonkey (Score:5, Informative)
The correct transliteration of German umlauts ä, ö and ü is "ae", "oe" and "ue". JaegerMonkey is correct.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:JägerMonkey (Score:4, Informative)
"Jäger" is German for "Hunter".
Once again we're treading into the territory: Can you be sued for using a word?
Re: (Score:2)
I imagine it's a reference to this alcoholic drink [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
There is evidence to suggest that George Welch [wikipedia.org], a Norther American Aviation test pilot, broke the sound barrier testing the F-86 about 2 weeks before Yaeger in the X-1.