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If you consider what these guys are doing with JavaScript 1, then can anyone tell me why we need JavaScript 2?

(Hint: We *don't*.)

It feels like Safari is moving so incredibly quickly. Webkit 3.1 already felt around twice as fast as webkit 3.0 in terms of javascript execution; now SquirrelFish is around one and a half times as fast again... in what's basically its first stable implementation. And they're already targetting optimisation points, and it's already caught up to Tamarin (and iirc webkit 3.1 is at least on par with firefox 2/3). Absolutely amazing.

The iPhone is the one to really benefit from this, because it's where the pauses are currently noticeable.

And IE really, really suffers in comparison. Microsoft has to be wincing about all this, if only for pride's sake... I'd love to see speed improvements to IE 8 beyond the what's known already, though the DOM speed improvements will help a lot for parity.

Check out this page, which tells you to set up another profile. You can have multiple Firefoxes running, just not on the same profile... http://ejohn.org/blog/sexy-firefox-3/

I know, and so does everyone else.

You know, I recently heard about a project by John Resig (creator of jQuery) called Processing.js. It's a Javascript port of the Processing Visualization Language, which means it could be viewd as a rival to Flash for online graphics content.

You should check out his blog post

In case the sarcasm wasn't obvious enough: that's one of the most important things that Javascript libraries solve

Agreed. The life demo is especially laggy. ( http://ejohn.org/apps/processing.js/examples/topics/conway.html )

You're going to be really glad you bought that Definitive Guide in a year or two. It's (IMHO) the best reference for javascript out there.

I recommend reading up on the work of Douglas Crockford and John Resig when you want to get into more advanced javascript.

In fact most people think Javscript is bad because they have to use it inside browsers which tend to ignore the specification (OK, the one with 75% market share). In most cases Javascript is not the reason for frustration but the lack of DOM-compliant behaviour of the browsers (Ok, the one with 75% market share).

You may read some articles about Javascript, which indeed has some cool features. And with Adobes open sourced VM (Tamarin) it has a rather fast implementation too.

The Next Big Language
ECMAScript: The Switzerland of development environments?
JavaScript Speed Tests

Indeed. Ever since Apple "opened up" its WebKit development, they've made quite a few cool innovations. In addition to cleaning up their JavaScript engine (which has been a sore point for Safari for the entirety of its existence), they're beginning to implement functions commonly provided by many of the increasingly popular Javascript Libraries.

Long and short, Safari's native implementation of getElementsByClassName is astronomically faster. Firefox 3 shows similar improvements over the JavaScript implementation of the same function.

On the other hand, it *does* beg the question of why on earth we haven't begun to design something a bit more friendly and efficient than JavaScript, which is (at best) an obfuscated nightmare, and pitifully slow on even the fastest of machines when performing simple tasks.

here

It looks like IE8 will use improved standards mode for HTML5 as described above, and will also do so for newer XHTML doctypes also. Now MS should drop the meta tag idea entirely. It's not needed after all anyway.

The interesting thing is that it was the fastest ever release of a browser update. John Resig gives most of the details: A security patch in Firefox 2.0.0.10 was incorrectly checked in, and introduced a bug which was not caught by the testing process. That was only discovered after the release, so the code was fixed and the whole release process had to start up again. Three days later, the 2.0.0.11 update is available for forty languages and three platforms.

So, it reflects badly on Mozilla's testing efforts, though that is an area where Firefox 3 has made significant improvements with automated testing. It reflects well on their release process, which can push out a critical update in just a few days.

This release did not address a "compatibility issue;" it was released solely to fix a bug in canvas.drawImage that was introduced in 2.0.0.10, the bug being that it no longer worked.

See more details at John Resig's blog.

Revenues: $66,840,850
Expenses: $19,776,193

"Profit" (or, change in net assets, since it's a non-profit): $27,893,735

According to Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO), salaries accounted for 70% of their expenses in 2006, so that's around $14 million. Net assets increased "only" by around $22 million (lower than the $28 million you calculated, perhaps because the Mozilla Corporation has to pay taxes).

Damn, it's good to be free. You'd think that the foundation would donate its money to fund other OSS projects, but as software people have discovered, the first priority of a foundation is to ensure the existence (and a lucrative existence at that) of its staff.

According to the numbers above, Mozilla employees could raise their salaries to 250% of what they now receive and still break even, but they chose not to. They could have made way more money by selling shares in the Mozilla Corp., instead of having it be fully owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, but they didn't.

See this summary of Mozilla grants for 2006. Near the end:

It's too early to tell how much we'll spend in total, but I suspect we'll easily double the amount spent in 2006. As we move into 2008 we'll also be funding projects in more areas.

I get the impression they've gone slow at first to "test the waters" and find the best way to spend their money. They're even looking for help in giving away more:

The other constant is the importance of having people who can help us put together a funding program in particular areas, as Aaron Leventhal has done for Mozilla accessibility. To repeat what I wrote last year:

We're looking for more people like Aaron to whom we can successfully delegate responsibility for suggesting and overseeing grants in their area(s) of expertise. If you're one of those people I'm interested in hearing from you.

They've been funding lots of accessibility work, whereas many for-profits ignore disabled users entirely. They've sponsored conferences on using the internet for the public good. They also sponsor projects that are not part of FF and its revenue stream: work on Linux desktop accessibility, Creative Commons and the Participatory Culture Foundation, buying commercial javascript code and releasing it as open source, Apache and OpenSSL, and just now Perl 6.

Mozilla is working right alongside Opera, Apple, and others to advance web standards in the WHATWG and W3C. Mozilla funds work on web standards (test cases, conformance checkers, etc.), works hard to implement these standards, and even tries to bring useful features of their own platform (such as XBL and the XUL box model) into web standards so the whole web can benefit--even if it means diminishing any comparative advantage of FF over other browsers. Mozilla is working to keep the web platform viable and open in light of competition from Silverlight, Apollo, and others.

Having followed Mozilla very closely for the past several years, I can tell you that these people are not in it for the money; they are religiously devoted to the idea of advancing the Open Web for the pub

Why is this "interesting"?

Look at the OpenAjax HUB:

http://ejohn.org/blog/thoughts-on-openajax/

This is clearly an attempt to wrest control of Ajax from the spotty oiks out there who made Ajax a success whilst Ms dropped the ball.

"Open" my arse. Open in the sense of this dungeon door is open, walk right in. Bring your wallet with you!

John Resig, lead developer of the jQuery library, has already written about this alliance. Choice quote:

This is all (hopefully) an overreaction. But the very fact that no non-legally-backed entities exist in the alliance (and the fact that no good corporation would sign a legal agreement ambiguously defining the status of an "organization") leads me to believe that many of today's poplar JavaScript libraries are intended to be left out of the drafting of the OpenAjax requirements.

Needing to be connected to the web sucks for those who travel.

This should be no surprise. About half a year ago I went to one of the BarCamp gatherings where a couple of people presented the results of their study of MySpace, where they found similar behaviour. But they found a lot of other interesting stuff. Here is the link: http://ejohn.org/blog/tags/barcamp/ (there is some actual code there) - scroll down to "Presentation 2: Subverting Social Networks (4:45pm, Sunday)" or just hit the slides directly: http://ejohn.org/files/social.pdf .

This should be no surprise. About half a year ago I went to one of the BarCamp gatherings where a couple of people presented the results of their study of MySpace, where they found similar behaviour. But they found a lot of other interesting stuff. Here is the link: http://ejohn.org/blog/tags/barcamp/ (there is some actual code there) - scroll down to "Presentation 2: Subverting Social Networks (4:45pm, Sunday)" or just hit the slides directly: http://ejohn.org/files/social.pdf .

LOL, same thing happened to me! I took a Screen Shot of it too... lol!