Mozilla Announces New Firefox JavaScript Engine

[Guest]

It appears as if Firefox 4 has grown old over the past few weeks it has been available.

Mozilla Announces New Firefox JavaScript Engine : Read more

 

[mister g]

Firing it out version aren't they? Well at least their numbering system works makes better sense than Chrome's.

 

[PhilFrisbie]

Until JavaScript speed is as fast as native code it would be stupid for any browser maker to call it 'good enough'. Every speed increase allows more processing to be done at the browser, which makes the user experience better. I prefer using JavaScript over Java because it is more portable (no run-time needed), it is easier to code, and it is easy to create dynamically generated code.

 

[bison88]

Sounds like you're comparing apples to oranges (Java vs Javascript), which I hope I'm wrong or misread that wrong because it would be entirely inaccurate.

 

[sykozis]

Why worry so much about JavaScript performance? Java performance is horrid in comparison.... Find ways to accelerate Java...

 

[tntom]

I hope it works with the Beta version of Yahoo Mail cause FF4 does not but Chrome does.

 

[damian86]

Looking good...

 

[jprahman]

IIRC it's not possible for browsers to appreciable accelerate Java performance. The reason is that Java Applets are run by a third party Java Runtime plugin provided by Sun, therefore Mozilla can't do anything to improve how fast the plugin runs.

 

[anon001]

Grecko engine has updated to 4.0 but orca still be 6.6i wish that orca will update the Grecko engine as soon as possible

 

[vk_87]

Great. Now its time to hit the numbers game.

 

[eddieroolz]

Soon we'll see Firefox 18 and people will wonder why its been around for so long.

 

[Silmarunya]

[citation][nom]sykozis[/nom]Why worry so much about JavaScript performance? Java performance is horrid in comparison.... Find ways to accelerate Java...[/citation]

How can you compare the two? JavaScript is a staple of modern websites - a vast amount of interactive content is built using it and its usage is ever increasing. Even online office suites (Docs for example) are JS apps.

Speeding up JS execution has become a deciding factor in speed - all browsers are great at HTML (okay, IE and Safari lag in HTML 5, but are soon going to make that right) and the speed penalty of it is far lower. Same thing for CSS. Flash is independent from the browser itself. So what's left? JS.

Java applets are used frequently on the web, but not as often as they used to be and there rarely are hundreds of them on a website (thank god). There's room for improvement, but comparing Java to JS is like comparing mangos to cereal crops - you need both, it's clear which one you need the most. Oh, and Java is far more browser independent (a bit like flash - provided by an external plugin. The only thing that differs greatly between browsers is the stability of the plugin, not its speed).

 

[ikefu]

[citation][nom]tntom[/nom]I hope it works with the Beta version of Yahoo Mail cause FF4 does not but Chrome does.[/citation]

Works great for me and I'm running FF4.

As far as JavaScript speed goes, I know that faster is always better but the browsers are so close now that its not a deciding factor for me at all. I like the layout and memory management of FF4 the best so I went with it.

 

[optimusprime619]

Firefox rules...RIP IE....

 

[PhilFrisbie]

[citation][nom]bison88[/nom]Sounds like you're comparing apples to oranges (Java vs Javascript), which I hope I'm wrong or misread that wrong because it would be entirely inaccurate.[/citation]
Here are more details of my comparison:

There are two popular ways to provide cross platform code to browsers - Java and JavaScript. Yes, there is also Flash, but I do not see developers using it extensively for applications like Java and JavaScript.

Java is faster, but it needs a run-time loaded.

JavaScript runs natively in the browser, and code can be easily generated/modified at the server as needed.