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Revamped WebKit JavaScript Engine Doubles In Speed
Shin-LaC writes "In a post on their official blog, WebKit developers introduced the 'next generation' of their JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme, claimed to be twice as fast as its predecessor. The post lists several changes contributing to the performance improvements, including 'bytecode optimization,' a 'polymorphic inline cache' (which sounds similar to V8's 'hidden class transitions'), and a 'context threaded JIT' compiler which generates native code (currently only for x86 processors), and is also applied to regular expressions. The new JavaScript engine is already available in the latest WebKit nightly builds. According to comparative benchmarks, the new engine is around 35% faster than the V8 engine recently introduced in Google Chrome, and 55% faster than Mozilla's TraceMonkey."
As you can see in this bar graph, our bar is bigger than our competitors' bars.
The next revision of SquirrelFish, said to make Javascript not suck anymore, is due to be released in 2048.
Excuse me, but I think that Tracemonkey is actually faster than V8. Has Tracemonkey really fallen that far behind in two weeks?
One of the things we've seen in the past few releases of any browser is that new features seem to increase the already monumental footprint of current web browsers. As far as I've seen, JIT compilers use a whole freaking lot of memory. While I suppose this is acceptable for the whole "Web 2.0 means the web is the only useful thing on your PC!" crowd, I'd like to have a few (3 or 4)browser tabs open while I'm playing a game, for example, without the browser killing my gaming experience.
Please help me pay for room & board.
This is a wonderful example of what happens when there are open standards and healthy competition! The consumer is the winner!
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
offtopic, no mention of javascript at link dest.
pls mod parent down if you see fit.
'bytecode optimized polymorphic inline cache'.
Sig this!
I really am loving this JS engine war; I don't program JavaScript, and know nothing about JIT, but having read more than my fair share of compiler optimization and analysis papers, it's really good to see that compiler tech and research is alive and kicking.
You know, 5 years ago, if somebody had asked me about Javascript, I would have told them that it was a dying technology. At the time, it seemed that it was only used for pop-ups and advertisements. Back then, I had it turned off in all of my browsers. Now, we rate browsers based on their Javascript performance... amazing.
An old question not entirely on-topic.
Can we try to update HTTP/HTML/JavaScript/Cookie paradigm to better accommodate web applications? All these improvements are great, but despite the improvement, some quite impressive technically, it all only adds up to minor incremental and inefficient improvements. Not to mention now that we have cell phones devices to accommodate.
If anyone has clout and interest in this, it'd be Google. I'm sick of responding to dialog boxes from cookie setting, noScript, etc.
Well, enough of that, time for me to get onto more serious drinking.
Show me an example of a website with so much javascript that it is too slow to use? I really don't know of any sites that bring Mozilla to a crawl, most of those are flash or java applets.
He who controls the test suite
Err, Google doesn't control or own the test suite. I wasn't talking about Apple either.
No, but they get to choose which test suite they use and post benchmarks from.
I have Opera 9.5 and FF 3 on my Ubuntu system. There is a noticeable difference in rendering speeds for JS medium-heavy websites between them, Opera being slower. Now, I had no idea of Opera's relative speed when I noticed this. So I tested them with Sunspider and surely enough there was a good gap between both, with FF 3 being much faster in benchmarks.
NB: I'm not being anti Opera. Opera is awesome, even though it's not my primary browser. I'm just saying you can notice the difference in slower JS engines.
Why? Does apple even sell those anymore?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Have a webapp that uses Extjs, and does some pretty hefty DOM manipulation. A small test on it just now, and firefox 3 still smokes the latest webkit on it by a very wide margin.
I never quite got how its a wonderful thing when Apple and Google cross-subsidize free-as-in-beer Internet browsers but when They Who Must Not Be Named do the same thing its evil, monopolistic, anti-consumer behavior.
Your javascript has got to run at a decent speed on all browsers. So given the fact that the slowest javascript interpreter in wide use is by a magnitude slower, I really doubt we'll see any really nifty applications any time soon; it will however take embed systems one step closer to their desktop counterpart.
This whole "who's fastest" is just like the chip wars. No real user understands this jive. Worse, just like the CPU, the speed of the JS engine is usually not the limiting factor in the User Experience. Design, Function, Server Response, Ad Calls... those all typically are what retard the user experience. If you work for clients like I do, we have to prepare for LCD not the slashdot guy who installs things in pre-release phases. Who Cares?!
The LGPL and BSD licenses are "free as in beer" now?
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Well, Google's is entirely open source, for one thing. You can't really make an anti-consumer argument about that.
I never quite got how its a wonderful thing when Apple and Google cross-subsidize free-as-in-beer Internet browsers but when They Who Must Not Be Named do the same thing its evil, monopolistic, anti-consumer behavior.
I can understand thinking it's not evil or anti-consumer... but c'mon - monopolistic? It's the very definition! A monopoly isn't illegal - using it to gain an advantage somewhere else is. Apple, with their pathetic little market share is not even close to a monopoly. Even their iPod is only like 70% of the market. Google has a near-monopoly on search - but how they are using that to gain an advantage via a web browser is pretty questionable. It's not like you have to use their browser to search or something - they don't even promote it on their home page.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I feel the same way about Android, incidentally. Now you're going to have a cellphone that's completely subsidized by another business in which the company has a virtual monopoly. And they'll be able to link their web content to their cellphone by adopting standards that the competition chooses not to (the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from). They're treading a pretty fine line here, and things like the Mobile Street View working on most phones except the iPhone aren't going the help the anti-trust argument any.
E pluribus unum
Even when they lose, they win.
You know what I can't believe? I can't believe this crap got modded up. Talk about a disingenuous argument if I ever saw one.
Call me when:
If Microsoft did even HALF of that you could act all high and mighty. But from where I stand, you're just another Microsoft shill. Be gone!!!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Uh, because Microsoft is a monopoly and Google and Apple are not?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Between TraceMonkey and SquirrelFish, "V8" seems so... weird. They better give it s regular, modern name like ThreadMole or SkunkAmoeba.
History lesson for people tempted to fall for this troll:
Once upon a time, people sold browsers just like they sold any other piece of software. Netscape were making money licensing their browser for corporate environments. The web, and consequently its leader, Netscape, threatened Microsoft's desktop monopoly. So Microsoft used all the cash they had from selling desktop operating systems, bought a web browser (defrauding that company in the process) and spent lots of money developing it further. Then they gave it away for free, at a massive loss to themselves, to "cut off Netscape's air supply". Still, that wasn't enough to unseat Netscape, so Microsoft went further and bundled it into their operating system too. Now all of a sudden 95% of the people on the planet had Microsoft's browser whether they liked it or not - and Netscape were basically dead.
Microsoft were able to eliminate the competition not because they offered a better product, but because they had a dominant position in another market and were willing to dump their product on the market no matter the cost, to put another company out of business. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work. The free market cannot deal with this situation well. The invisible hand is tied behind its invisible back. So in many countries, abusing a monopoly position in this way is illegal. And that's why Microsoft is vilified here - because they acted like bullies, took something dear to geeks, and shat all over it to make money.
Now that browsers are a commodity, how are Apple and Google harming the browser market with anticompetitive actions? Answer - they aren't. They are actually competing by providing better products. And that's why it's completely different to what Microsoft did.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Chrome/V8 is faster than Firefox/Tracemonkey. WebKit/SquirrelFish Extreme is faster than Chrome/V8. Firefox/Tracemonkey is faster than Chrome/V8. And around we go, always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
Only one way to settle this, a shootout. Spidermokey is already on there. Get the rest of them up. (I'd get V8 up except it's missing command line arguments.)
An excellent post, sir. I salute you. Mod parent up.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
According to comparative benchmarks, the new engine is around 35% faster than the V8 engine recently introduced in Google Chrome, and 55% faster than Mozilla's TraceMonkey.
If you remember, TraceMonkey was benched to be faster than V8, Brendan Eich said: "We win by 1.28x and 1.19x, respectively. Maybe we should rename TraceMonkey "V10" ;-)."
And now somehow Safari beats TraceMonkey by 20% more than it beats V8. Funny that.
Those benchmarks are useless.
I second that. You've just been added to my friends list.
But plenty of people still use them.
you had me at #!
This is not how capitalism is supposed to work. The free market cannot deal with this situation well.
The free market has been dealing with it, and is slowly cutting Microsoft browser marketshare down to a size where they too must adhere to standards.
I don't see why everyone thinks a free market MUST fix everything instantly. It's all about the long term. Even when a company like Microsoft becomes dominant, you can see that over time they simply become irrelevant and other companies can eventually wear them down.
And of course, it's not like we have a completely open market anyway - there's a lot of regulation going on in our "free" market.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Once upon a time, people sold browsers just like they sold any other piece of software. Netscape were making money licensing their browser for corporate environments. The web, and consequently its leader, Netscape, threatened Microsoft's desktop monopoly. So Microsoft used all the cash they had from selling desktop operating systems, bought a web browser (defrauding that company in the process) and spent lots of money developing it further"
And now we have free and even open source browsers as well! Thank you Microsoft for taking the money out of the browser market so that we can all now download a choice of free browsers for surfin 'net with! x x
hehe
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
and I'm not even running any benchmarks. :)
FF3 running with something like 45 tabs open in five separate windows. Whee!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Mostly correct. Netscape made money selling their horrid web server in corporate environments. They were giving the browser away for free for non-commercial users. If the truth were told, back when Netscape was a relevant browser, most of my coworkers were grabbing the free, non-commercial version and installing it at work. And Netscape didn't really care, as they were giving away their browser in order to drive sales of their server. Netscape's server arm survived for a loooong time, finally becoming the basis for Sun's application server. IIRC, only the newest version of Sun's app server (i.e. 9.x aka GlassFish) doesn't directly trace it's roots to Netscape/iPlanet. And let's not forget Netscape Directory Server. Or, as it's known today, RedHat Directory Server. During the dot-com era, it was one of the better LDAP implementations.
He was talking about Microsoft
Does anyone know how much of a factor regular expression processing speed is to modern browser performance? What sort of sites would stress it?
If they had better regexp algorithms, how much would it matter? (and yes, I know its a hard problem)
--Q
> gave it away for free, at a massive loss to themselves,
Microsoft had Spyglass write IE for them and the deal was that Spyglass would get $5.00 for every copy that MS sold. MS then gave it away and thus nothing was ever paid to Spyglass.
There was certainly no "loss to themselves".
They did also pay various OEMs $5.00 a time to _not_ install Netscape. Or specifically it was a $5.00 discount on the price of Windows if Netscape was not installed, so that was a cost to MS.
The former was immoral, the latter was probably illegal.
By using Chrome as your preferred browser, your E-Penis will increase by a whopping 74%.
I feel the same way about Android, incidentally. Now you're going to have a cellphone that's completely subsidized by another business in which the company has a virtual monopoly. And they'll be able to link their web content to their cellphone by adopting standards that the competition chooses not to (the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from). They're treading a pretty fine line here, and things like the Mobile Street View working on most phones except the iPhone aren't going the help the anti-trust argument any.
I share the sentiment, but the iPhone makes me shudder more, by iTunes tie-in alone. The mobile market needs an open OS for these "next-gen" phones, and who's got the money/motivation/ability to deliver it? Android is definitely beneficial to Google, but all optimism remains in it being beneficial to us as well.
I suppose the best outcome might be Android's success, and a full fork that makes Google's version optional. Google's been subsidizing Firefox, after all, and that's worked out.
Bingo. What it comes down to is that the answer to "Is X faster than Y" will depend on two things:
1) The benchmark
2) The day of the week (or the exact, to the minute builds you're testing, if you prefer)
The reason for the latter is that all three are in active development. Each one is doing measurements right after landing major changes, against whatever the current state of the other two is. That means that there is inherent bias there in favor of whoever is doing the measurements being fastest: they've just hopped a step up in performance while the other two engines are on the same step they were at 3 minutes ago.
The same thing will happen with stable releases, for what it's worth. Safari 3 shipped a faster JS engine than Firefox 2. Then Firefox 3 shipped faster than Safari 3. We'll see what the ship dates for Safari 4 and Firefox 3.1 or whatever look like, but I suspect tat if things continue as they are each will be the fastest shipping stable thing at ship time.
Which is more or less what you said, I guess. ;)
If Javascript is fast enough, it is a great opportunity to embed it into your applications. /Rebol) than C/C++. Java and C# is pretty good but am still researching the possiblility of embedding the VM into my app. CPU time may be cheap, but I dont want my app to appear slow to anyone who use it. Experience is everything: no one buy faster CPU, SSD just to burn more cycles.
Tracemonkey/Spidermonkey does not seems to be really well documented. Besides, Yahoo thinks Javascript is the easiest to learn.
Having used a few "scripting" languages and tested a few more like Eurphoria, Pike, Lua, CINT, etc. Anything that is not statically-typed is slow: in the order of magnitude of approximately 3X (Eurphoria) to 220X slower (Ruby
BTW, Guile still won't compile on Win32 system.
It's been possible to run JavaScript on a JVM for some time now (based on Mozilla's Rhino). Does anybody have any numbers as to how these recent in-browse JavaScript optimisations stack up against 10+ years of Sun work on general virtual machine optimisation? Could it be faster just to fire up the Sun JVM and use that as the JavaScript engine?
"Fuck it," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!"
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole."
"Of course, we're still not evil," said Sergey Brin of Google. "You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my 'spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Uh, because Microsoft is a monopoly and Google and Apple are not?
Wait... Google is not a monopoly? Ahahaha, nice one
... please don't let it happen that JavaScript becomes the successor of C and the browser the successor of Windows ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
What? Immoral? Uh no. More like Spyglass had crappy lawyers and/or businessmen representing them in their negotiations with Microsoft.
Others have pointed out that Netscape was actually making its money from server software, but you're missing the really big point: the Netscape browser was a piece of shit. I was an early Netscape user but I switched to IE because it was better.
If MS hadn't killed Netscape the internet now would probably be dominated by two crap standards-ignoring browsers - Netscape and IE.
Fuck Netscape, they got what they deserved.
Do any of the engines mentioned in these postings offer a clean way of using JavaScript as a standalone engine for non-browser applications?
I don't want a Java based one (don't want the JVM). I'm trying to compile V8 alone but the code has issues right now if you don't use VC++. I've tried SpiderMonkey in the past but that code is just difficult to follow.
Interestingly under windows the WSH (Windows Scripting Host) can work with either JavaScript of VB script. The engine allows the JavaScript code to access many of the Windows objects.
I'd like to see a JavaScript engine with pluggable modules (sort of like TCL) and possibly a nice accessible GUI (like TK).
Any suggestions on which engine is best to use as the standalone interpreter with the easiest extensibility?
JavaScript in Firefox is (almost?) never the source of security problems in the real world. If Noscript stops something is only because an exploit in another component also uses JavaScript (and often only because the person writing the exploit code was lazy).
Try disabling Java and deinstalling Flash and all the plugins (or at least using Flashblock) and Adblock Plus+Easylist. You will achieve exactly the same results.
I'm a web developer and I'm asking to please don't disable JavaScript. It's not a security problem per-se if you keep your browser updated and in fact makes the web *less* safe because encourages legitimate web developers to use much worse alternatives, like Flash.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
On my quad core machine I've got logitech mx620 mouse which scrolls very accuratly so i have set one "tick" of scroll wheeel is one line annd it barely heaps up wyth rendering speed on firefox on chrome a bit better until i fire up some download then it becomes more sluggish than firefeox wit multiple tabs loading and downloadin files. on dual core laptop scroll is too very sensitive and i would like to think that dual core machine would keep up with scrolling but it doesn't. and while this is a bit inconvinient scrolling on my asus 901 in firefox is pain in chrome works quite well but when download stars it is imposiible to use the browser. I mean nice that java script speeds that can make huge difference on webapp style pages but scrolling shpuld be fast and accurate.
All the open source projects are benefiting from each other at an amazing rate with healthy competition. I'm anxious to see how well Microsoft will do in the end, all alone without the ability to use anyone else's code.
ayottesoftware.com
the JavaScript engine wars.
These projects aren't using each other's code, really. Not for the JS engine.
And all three JS engines are under licenses that would allow Microsoft to use them if so desired (BSD, BSD/LGPL and MPL/GPL/LGPL).
GASP
You say "now that browsers are a commodity" like that fact isn't linked to IE being released for free. I'd say browsers are a commodity strictly BECAUSE Microsoft made them so.
I also find it funny that Slashdot talks about commoditizing software as a horrible thing when it comes to web browsers in 1995 but as somewhere between inevitable and a moral imperative for OSs (Linux) and other software now.
Once upon a time, people sold browsers just like they sold any other piece of software. Netscape were making money licensing their browser for corporate environments. The web, and consequently its leader, Netscape, threatened Microsoft's desktop monopoly. So Microsoft used all the cash they had from selling desktop operating systems, bought a web browser (defrauding that company in the process) and spent lots of money developing it further. Then they gave it away for free, at a massive loss to themselves, to "cut off Netscape's air supply". Still, that wasn't enough to unseat Netscape, so Microsoft went further and bundled it into their operating system too. Now all of a sudden 95% of the people on the planet had Microsoft's browser whether they liked it or not - and Netscape were basically dead.
Microsoft were able to eliminate the competition not because they offered a better product, but because they had a dominant position in another market and were willing to dump their product on the market no matter the cost, to put another company out of business. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work. The free market cannot deal with this situation well. The invisible hand is tied behind its invisible back. So in many countries, abusing a monopoly position in this way is illegal. And that's why Microsoft is vilified here - because they acted like bullies, took something dear to geeks, and shat all over it to make money.
Now that browsers are a commodity, how are Apple and Google harming the browser market with anticompetitive actions? Answer - they aren't. They are actually competing by providing better products. And that's why it's completely different to what Microsoft did.
Ahh.. this is the reason I still read Slashdot comments. I love it when people pretend to have a clue. So much is left out from this rant you copied and pasted from some linux fanboy dot com web site that I wouldn't know where to start. Could you set up an RSS feed so I can read your humorous, kiddie, fan boy, copy and paste rants without having to dig around for them?
As for GUI, I don't really know anything about GUI development, but I'd totally be up for a collaboration if somebody wanted to do simple widgets. I was thinking of ripping apart Dialog for X (nee cdialog) and cloning that functionality someday.
There are already Tk bindings for Scheme and Perl as well as Tcl, why not implement Javascript/Tk and avoid all the heavy lifting?
i have a page which does some numerical simulation in javascript,
essentially an O(N^2) finding-nearest-neighbors-in-two-dimensions thing,
and here are some trials w/ 2000 points, on an x86 windows machine:
Safari 3.1.2 - ~50 seconds, maybe more
Safari 3.1.2 + Webkit - ~10 seconds
Firefox 3.0.2 - ~22 seconds
Chrome 0.2.149.30 - ~19 seconds
need I remind you that IE4 was a much much better browser than netscape's at the time? If it had sucked or netscape was better then people would have used netscape. I used to try to use netscape and gave up because it sucked so much.
Microsoft did offer a better product, and they did so at no extra cost.
And yes, it pains me to say it :(
I'm really looking forward to having webkit in epiphany :)
Microsoft were able to eliminate the competition not because they offered a better product
uhhhh it WAS the better browser of the time.
It didnt crash every other site. It didnt lock up randomly, the java (BUILT IN not downloaded) was faster. It rendered pages faster. plugins were easy to make (activex).
Now looking back at it some of those things were not as good as we thought they were (looking at you activex).
Yeah everyone just jumped at IE because netscape was such a better product. Lets face it netscape was flakey. IE was just *less* flakey than netscape.
Also by your very logic. Apple and Google are giving it away. Soooooooooo if it is a better product why are they not charging for it? Especially Apple they nickel and dime you for everything. They are doing the SAME thing. Better product at 0 cost? How are they NOT dumping? Apple even tried to tie it to iTunes and people reacted rather negatively. And what will be the built in browser for the next OSX?
Do not buy into the groupspeak that everything MS does and everything everyone else does is good. MS learned from Apple, IBM, Oracle, and others.
Next week: NullJS v0.5beta!
Sends all your JS hacks to /dev/null.
Runs SunSpider in 2 ms!
472% faster than SquirrelFish,
640% faster than V8,
732% faster than TraceMonkey!
Does anyone know if this means that, eventually, the iPhone might benefit from this performance improvement? I was under the impression that Safari was webkit-based but I don't know if that includes Mobile Safari or not. Anyone know?
So as someone who still hasn't formed an educated opinion on this subject, I'd like to ask: what made Microsoft so evil?
As far as I can tell, Microsoft is only guilty of forcing its way into a market that was previously dominated by Netscape by handing away its browser application for free. They also bundled their browser onto their operating systems to further get people to use their product over Netscape's. However, at the same time Netscape gave out their non-commercial client browser for free as well. Also, there was nothing stopping Netscape from running on the Windows operating system at the time. Thus a consumer at the time using Windows had the choice of either bringing Netscape onto their OS (at no charge to them) or using the native IE that came with the OS.
What I fail to understand though, is why IE won out in the end. If your claim is true, that IE was an inferior product thrown together to drive Netscape out of business, I cannot perceive why the consumer would choose such an inferior product over a superior one that costs the same thing. Perhaps there's a convenience factor involved, but even still, that shouldn't be enough to give Microsoft the monopoly that it established.
Also there are commenters below who claim that IE was actually the better product and support that claim with details on how IE was better. Please explain why you claim that Netscape was better. Citations would help your rebuttal.
This, of course, worried MS, so they bought a web browser and tightly integrated with their MS Windows Desktop. This did three things. First, it made the WWW a MS product, as many sites would now only run on MS Windows. Second, it allowed a much tighter control over presentation, which broke the HTML standard that focused on context tags, not presentation. Three, much like the DOS days where MS put most third developers at a great disadvantage by limiting information, Netscape was not able to compete and keep a OS neutral product.
This caused netscape problems, and while many of us who were not slaves to MS continued to use it, many thought netscape was inferior because it properly and rightly broke when put forth with substandard programming the MS encouraged. Truth be told, as Netscape lost market share, the browser itself became in fact bad, and the death was likely a good thing.
By that time everyone used IE, and the web was broken, apparently beyond all hope. It took about 5 years to fix it. Several technologies that allowed the compulsive types to impose look and feel, like flash and CSS, helped this trend. The emergence of Scandanavia and western europe as serious player in the software game also helped. Google, as well as web retailers in general, pushing for maximum customer base, developed other technologies that rendered the IE hacks much less crucial. The key though was the commodization of the web engine, which meant that most of use one of a small set of engines, with the notable exception of IE and Opera.
The thing is that the new web war is moot. As long as MS has a desktop monopoly, they will abuse it by tying IE and pushing customers to related assets. Google is going to have a hard time leveraging it's essential search monopoly to making customer use a special web browser to access content. Perhaps in certain enterprise setting, but what enterprise is going to release ownership of sensitive data.
In any case, the new game in town is virtualization, and this provides a method to wean customers away from MS as well as provide the central control and distribution of big iron while retaining the benefits of the microcomputer. Given that virtualization implies that the current OS is flexible, one might assume that a browser that runs on any OS, like Firefox, or Opera, or even Safari if Apple can get it up, will be the browser of choice.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I was an early Netscape user but I switched to IE because it was better.
That's absolutely true. I recall coding for IE 4 vs. NS 4. There was no comparison, you could actually *do* things with IE 4. NS 2 and 3 were great but the engine assumed the page would load in a linear manner. NS's own hacks blew this model up and they never reworked it. By the time the layer and ilayer tags came around, the engine was collapsing under its own weight.
But with Android it goes beyond the phone. Word is that the Google App Store is going to be completely free for developers. Google will host, ship, clear, etc. In essence, it will be subsidized by Google's existing server infrastructure. Apple would have a really hard time competing with that.
E pluribus unum
so in other words, thank god for MS??
you make it sound like they did something bad. if it wasn't for them, we'd be stuck paying for browsers and netscape would be a monopoly. good job MS, running a profiteering company into the ground so a better product and lower prices can make it to the consumer.
I"m not sure why you are complaining. you applaud google and apple and mozilla for competing and providing a "commodity" product but hate the company that started the revolution of commodity web browsers. can you believe you used to pay for something equivalent to a better JS engine over the "freer, slower" version? w/o MS few could imagine a world where companies expended tons of resources to give away a product to increase it's footprint.
I'm glad they drove that waste of space netscape into the ground. it may have stagnated browser development for a few years, but it created the environment for a far more robust browser market than ever before (and it's all FREE).
WebKit added W3C Selectors API early this year so it makes a reasonable milestone in the development. It's no coincidence Google chose WebKit core for the Chrome.