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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."
Because a lot of browser vulnerabilities either inject platform specific code or download a binary. If the binary isn't made for Linux nothing happens. If the code doesn't run on Linux then again, nothing happens. Also, most Linux users know that something is wrong when they have a browser toolbar they didn't install, on the other hand Windows users are used to MS forcing updates after updates at them and think that it is perfectly natural that their homepage is hijacked to some ad website and they have 10 popups every hour and they have 3 browser toolbars they never installed. The Windows way teaches people they don't own their computers and so they are naturally less aware of changes whereas with Linux (or any other non-Windows platform) something got changed the average person would at least look into it somewhat.
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