Implications of the Mozilla/Adobe Partnership

Fraggle writes "Recently the Mozilla Foundation and Adobe announced a partnership, working together on the next generation JavaScript/ActionScript JIT Virtual Machine. The Browser Den looks at what this means for the future of scripting in Mozilla, and how this partnership with Adobe may affect Mozilla's support for other technologies such as SVG." From the article: "On the Mozilla side the plan is to integrate to code with SpiderMonkey which is Mozilla's current JavaScript implementation that is written in C. This is needed because Tamarin is not a drop-in replacement for SpiderMonkey as it provides necessary features that are not available in Tamarin. The combined SpiderMonkey with integrated Tamarin should not have any problems with old JavaScript and should show a performance boost for most. However, skilled scripters are sure to find ways of optimising performance to get even more gains."

Comments

First post !

[Rastignac]

With Tamarin, FireFox will be faster... "First post !" for sure. ;)

Re:Amazing

[foniksonik]

"I just hope that they don't embed Flash player into the browser. That would suck royally."

Don't disparage something you don't understand. It's like saying you hate all music cause you heard a few Britney Spears songs.

Take a look at OpenLaszlo.

Credible OSS response to .NET (on the desktop)

[sreekotay]

Despite all the harping, .NET has been a huge success for Microsoft in Corporate/Server development. On the desktop, just as MS is afraid of Flash and Firefox (not coincidental or surprising they linked up) obviating the need for , I think Adobe, et al have been concerned about the potential impact of WPF, etc. for what they call the RIA space.

Some early benchmarks comparing SpiderMonkey, what would become Tamarin, and JScript.NET. are on my site... interesting is that neither CLR, nor Tamarin provide a big boost when you use the features of JavaScript that make it more interesting than just plain old C. Wonder how much a real world boost this will be for the integration complexity? (i.e. is this another Netscape 6? Perhaps buckling down and fixing SpiderMonkey might serve better...)
--
graphically speaking

Re:Credible OSS response to .NET (on the desktop)

[laffer1]

They might be able to improve the new combined code to execute faster. This whole thing sounds a lot like Java to me. It will be slow starting up and after a page is loaded, it can execute very quickly. Based on recent research for ecommerce sites, I suspect this may have a negative impact on Firefox adoption down the road. The point of JavaScript was to make a lightweight interpreted language that could glue together other components such as plugins, later java, flash and active x controls.

I understand why some people like flash, but I don't understand why people support flash taking over. Macromedia and now Adobe support 99% of all browsers supposedly, but at the same time there are huge gaps in platform support. Its near impossible to have a new OS enter the market without support for Firefox, Flash and a slew of other things. What happens if Linux forks someday or gets so commercial the grass roots folks start over. Remember, the uniqueness of linux was that it was free. The idea of developing in an open environment started long before linux and shortly after linux was public we had 386BSD > NetBSD and FreeBSD. What if someone develops a miracle microkernel design that just works. Anything is a possibility and I think the open source community needs to take charge with Flash if we are going to push it on people. I'd rather go an SVG route where we have open source libraries for it already. A combination of SVG, and some other open source technologies could get us an equivalent to flash but it would need serious adoption to take off. Perhaps when people are tired of paying the adobe premium for Flash? To a windows developer, Adobe products are reasonable but to a Mac or OSS developer you can't beat free. As we are talking about flash as an application platform, xcode is a fair comparison here.

Is Adobe/Macromedia losing it?

[pubjames]

When Macromedia started, they made great tools. They looked at what professional web developers wanted, and made neat tools to fulfil their needs. Unfortunately, for a while now they have been operating in an entirely different manner - they have been deciding where they want the technology to go, and then trying to push tools that fulfil their vision onto web developers.

This has meant that their core products, such as Dreamweaver and the Flash development application, have been rapidly becoming crappier. Dreamweaver is now annoying as hell to use, and does work well with some of the technologies that developers like to use (PHP, for instance) because those are not technologies Macromedia/Adobe what to promote. And for ages they have been trying to get developers to use Flash to develop applications, which just isn't happening.

Personally, I think Macromedia/Adobe are going to suffer as developers reject their tools and start using open source ones.

About SVG

[supabeast!]

From TFA

I've seen some theories on the Internet suggest that part of the deal with Adobe was to remove the native SVG support from Firefox effectively reducing the competition for Flash.

There's no need for Adobe to make such a deal. Anyone who has tried using SVG on Firefox knows that the code renders so slowly as to be almost unusable, and lacks support for a tremendous number of SVG features. On top of that Adobe's own staff were always the big force behind SVG, now that Adobe has pulled out of SVG development its safe to say that SVG has no future outside of the tiny community of inkscape users.

The only way I could see them removing SVG support would be if Adobe ever decided to open source the Flash player but even then I could imagine that this would not be a popular move as SVG is an open standard.

Aside from the video codecs--which are no doubt entangled in far too many patent issues for Adobe to publish the standards--Flash is just as open as SVG, and it's a shame that open standards pundits refuse to stop pretending otherwise. It makes them sound just as stupid as the HD-DVD evangelists who pretend that HD-DVD is any less proprietary than Blu-Ray, and its hard to convince people that standards-based web development is important when this kind of garbage keeps getting spewed out.

SVG will eventually get yanked from Firefox not because of sleazy deals between Adobe and the Mozilla foundation, but due to the W3C not being behind SVG, SVG not having enough developers, the majority of SVG content on the web being experimental projects, and lack of software support for animated SVG content.

That's swell

[Anonymous Coward]

Now all we need is a solution to the security problem caused by sites having the abilty to run arbitrary script to begin with. Javascript is great language and I look forward to my browser extensions running on a VM with a JIT, however AJAX is still going to be an inaccessible toy.