Mozilla Announces New Firefox JavaScript Engine
We are hearing plenty about Firefox 5, which should become available as a beta browser next month. There has not been much news, however, about the Firefox core and how it would change to deliver the ongoing performance improvements Mozilla outlined in its Firefox roadmap in February.
Today we got a better look at what we can expect in the next versions of Firefox - Firefox 5, 6, 7 and 8. According to a blog post by Dave Mandelin, Mozilla will give Firefox a new debugger, an updated garbage collection process, a few JavaScript enhancements as well as a redesigned JIT compiler. Called IonMonkey, the compiler should be significantly faster than today's JaegerMonkey. It is somewhat surprising to see Mozilla working on JavaScript performance as both Microsoft and Google appear to be happy with their performance levels. Firefox 4 can't match Chrome or IE9 in every benchmark, but it was generally considered to be good enough.
Mozilla also said that it is making changes to its Gecko rendering engine. Project "Azure" targets the creation of a new 2D graphics API for Firefox as well as new 3D backends to accelerate content rendering to OpenGL, Direct3D 9, and Direct3D 10. When implemented, we should see much more efficient hardware acceleration performance that works across all popular OS platforms, including Windows XP.
Firefox 5 may receive some new features, but Mozilla was pretty clear when it stated that this work is very much in the starting phase. Firefox 7 and 8 are better bets to expect IonMonkey and Azure.
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Firing it out version aren't they? Well at least their numbering system works makes better sense than Chrome's.
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.
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.
Why worry so much about JavaScript performance? Java performance is horrid in comparison.... Find ways to accelerate Java...
I hope it works with the Beta version of Yahoo Mail cause FF4 does not but Chrome does.
Looking good...
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.
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
Great. Now its time to hit the numbers game.
Soon we'll see Firefox 18 and people will wonder why its been around for so long.
Why worry so much about JavaScript performance? Java performance is horrid in comparison.... Find ways to accelerate Java...
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).
I hope it works with the Beta version of Yahoo Mail cause FF4 does not but Chrome does.
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.
Firefox rules...RIP IE....
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.
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.