MS, Mozilla Clashing Over JavaScript Update

jfruhlinger writes "JavaScript has become a crucial part of Websites built on AJAX underpinnings, which makes the upcoming revision to the ECMAScript standard crucial for the future of the Web. But in today's browser environment, no one vendor can impose an update path — which may set things up for a nasty conflict. A fight is being fought on blogs between Mozilla Chief Technology Officer (and creator of JavaScript) Brendan Eich, who wants to the new ECMAScript standard to be a radical upgrade, and Chris Wilson, architect of MS's IE team, who would rather keep JavaScript as is and put new functionality into a brand-new language."

Comments

Re:Either way...

[RightSaidFred99]

Yeah, design by commitee always works out so well! Seriously, third party standards bodies are only good at post-facto. Don't rely on them to innovate. I say IE and Mozilla battle it out, release the product, and may the best man win. Once a winner is reasonably clear, then the standards bodies can get in and write it in stone.

Multithreading!

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're serious about turning the browser into an application platform, there needs to be a multithreaded language with full DOM access, whether that is Javascript or something else. An application where the UI stalls the processing or the other way around is just not acceptable. Since Javascript multithreading has been rejected before, because it's supposedly too difficult for the typical script author, I suspect that Microsoft may have the right instinct here to go with a separate language for "pros", keeping Javascript simple for things like mouse rollovers and other eye candy.

Re:Multithreading!

[_xeno_]

Surely you could solve that particular issue by running Firefox-itself code in one thread, and on-page-javascript-or-whatever-script in another thread (or perhaps one thread per .js, or per site, or per tab, or whatever). You wouldn't need to actually let the script writer work in multiple threads, would you?

Yes, you would. The basic reason is that while, conceptually, you're right that you could use your solution to prevent the browser from locking up, you'd still have to worry about the page locking up.

JavaScript code is generally only executed during events. These events include relatively minor things like scrolling, clicking, typing, or basically any form of interaction with the page. Now you could make the page code "smart" and avoid locking the page if there are no JavaScript event handlers interested in the current event, but you'd still potentially have issues where the page would essentially "freeze" until whatever long-running task completed. Since JavaScript events also fire when the page is unloaded, such a "freeze" could also prevent the user from navigating away from the page.

This leaves us with a potentially responsive browser UI, but a tab that can't be used until its task completes. This is still better than the Firefox situation (and, due to the way Firefox is designed, something that isn't going to change in Firefox for a long while), but still undesirable.

To allow the page to remain responsive while the page is doing some long-running task, you'd have to allow multiple threads so that the event handlers could run.

This is, in a way, the problem that "asynchronous" part of AJAX solves. It doesn't allow another thread to be run via script, but it does allow the page to send the task back to the server to execute, allowing the page to remain responsive while whatever long-running task completes.

I think a similar solution could work via JavaScript: instead of sending it off to the server, allow a script to be executed asynchronously. It would have no access to any information not sent to it when it was started (as otherwise the thread synchronization issues would remain), but it could run a task and then return a result.

There can be some argument over whether JavaScript should ever be used for a "long-running task" but the reality is that more and more web applications are finding that it makes sense to allow certain tasks to run on the client instead of burdening the servers. Most clients have the memory and CPU to spare, and it makes sense to use those resources instead of making the bottle-neck be the server.

Unfortunately the current solutions cause the page to become non-responsive while JavaScript executes and, in the case of poorly designed browsers, cause the entire browser to be non-responsive.

What's this all about?

[Anonymous Conrad]

OK, maybe I'm missing the point here but AFAICS no-one's arguing against the new draft; instead, the argument about whether you accept the new syntax inside tags or not. One side says yes, other says we should keep that for older JS and put the new stuff inside tags or similar so we can tell ahead of time which one we're supposed to be dealing with and make sure we don't break existing web code.

I don't see anything about closing the web or stomping on the little guy or anything like that. Where's that coming from?

MS Trying to undo the Outlook Web Access Mistake

[TheNarrator]

I think Microsoft royally screwed up with outlook web access. They added XMLHttpRequest to the browser so outlook web access would work more like a desktop app. They built an application on a technology that did not require full access to the latest version of the win32 api and x86 assembly language and it was off to the races. Most of Google, Yahoo and indeed the entirety of Web 2.0 was built on this mistake. They are desperately trying to put the web back in the original box they intended it to be in which is people without access to the latest version of the full Win32 API, and an X86 processor will be denied access to all online content.