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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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Between TraceMonkey and SquirrelFish, "V8" seems so... weird. They better give it s regular, modern name like ThreadMole or SkunkAmoeba.
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.
Simple answer. Stop being so paranoid. Just allow all first-party cookies, have a decent /etc/hosts file that blocks ads and use Linux/OS X/Any OS other than Windows and you are basically safe from any major malware outbreak. I've tried noScript and found it to be more of a pain then it was worth. Sure, it might make you less secure, but honestly, I run Linux and even though it is possible to hack a Linux box, most script kiddies won't bother.
.01% of the internet that doesn't just accept scripts and cookies.
Google doesn't care about you, the
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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
What exactly has windows got to do with browser vulnerabilities (aside from IE, of course)?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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.
That's a very good...pile of FUD right there.
Lets see here, you're pretty much saying that if you use Linux, you'll simply KNOW when something is up with your system, but if you use windows, you wont because you'll think it's just some sort of update Microsoft is pushing on you? What about the average Mac user, do you honestly think they're "Technically-inclined" when the entire marketing campaign Apple uses can be summed up as "Buy a Mac - because it'll make you cool"? Or what about all those people who just bought an Eee PC (or similar) because they're affordable and all the rage? Will they suddenly become experts overnight and know the ins/outs of linux, at least enough to know when it's doing something it's not supposed to?
Besides, when was the last time you seen Windows Update automatically install a new toolbar or whatever? The only thing I can think of in recent memory was the new Live search thing and I'm sure that was an OPTIONAL download anyway (and anyone that just ticks all the boxes and downloads anything they see without reading about what they're getting is just asking for trouble). Even IE7 is optional. Everything else is just security/program updates, with the exception of the odd service pack (which is what, once every 2 years?).
Plus, it's not like modern Linux distributions don't have their own update programs within them, particularly those designed for the novice user. How are they going to know that their fancy new toolbar isn't just something linux has?
Your advice to the above poster is possibly the worst advice you could ever give anyone - "Use this OS and you'll be safe!". That's a load of bull, it just takes one person to make a virus and/or Trojan targeting that OS and your complacency will be taken complete advantage of because "you're running linux - YOU'RE SAFE!". The best way to ensure your system doesn't get compromised is to be careful and vigilant, which is exactly what the OP is, then even the "few" script kiddies that actually do target you will be hard pushed to hax0r your b0x0r.
Yes, it's a minor inconvenience, but it's the ONLY way to be absolutely sure you're safe. And yes, this even works on WINDOWS boxes. Shocking, I know.
I hate defending Microsoft, but I hate it even more when people bash them for all the wrong reasons, or use feeble excuses - at least have a go at them for something genuine, it's not like you haven't got much to pick at them with.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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
Your advice to the above poster is possibly the worst advice you could ever give anyone - "Use this OS and you'll be safe!". That's a load of bull, it just takes one person to make a virus and/or Trojan targeting that OS and your complacency will be taken complete advantage of because "you're running linux - YOU'RE SAFE!".
Hmmm... right, and wrong.
You (and also the GP poster) have fallen for the "Linux isn't hacked because it's not the majority" straw-man. Linux is much harder to hack because it provides a much better security than Windows. For starters, you can run your software as non-root! And for any installation you actually have to provide a password. Compared to the Vista "Cancel, Allow" prompts, this is much better, because people unconsciously hit allow because they get trained (by Vista) to do that. Also, GNU/Linux does not have unknown services enabled by default.
Also, when the GP says that Linux users know something's wrong because they have an extra toolbar, he's right. If I have an extra toolbar on Firefox that I didn't install, i'm not just in trouble. I'm in DEEP trouble and I can almost guarantee that someone pwned my PC (or at least my user account). This is a question of knowledge, granted, but Windows users who have NO IDEA of what's going on inside their OS, just say "oh well, I'll just have to get accustomed to it". And the worst part: they DO get accustomed to it! It's like the battered wife syndrome, but with viruses.
Also, Microsoft products are prone to have security holes because their software is not open source (many eyes make bugs shallow). Open Source software gets updated almost the day after when a vulnerability is discovered.
Finally, MS products are also prone to have security holes because since the old MS Word days they keep mixing data with code. First there were the Word Viruses, then the Excel Viruses, then the e-mail viruses, and thanks to ActiveX, webpage viruses. And if that wasn't enough, we got WMV viruses, MP3 viruses (which are possible thanks to stupid security policies like not warning you when the filetype is actually different than the extension reported), and don't get me started with autorun.inf viruses in USB drives.
They never learn!
So, yes, GNU/Linux is more secure per-se than Microsoft Windows. That's a FACT. And yes, it's also more secure because GNU/Linux users are more careful.
I never once said that Linux is just as easy to attack as Windows. I also never said that it's security had anything to do with it's overall marketshare, what I said was that if you believe you're secure BECAUSE you're using Linux, then you're just as vulnerable to attack. True, the chances of some random exploit being a problem are severely reduced, but it's not like a clever kiddie couldn't produce different attack code depending on what the User Agent of your browser reports.
I also (briefly, perhaps I brushed over this one a bit too much) tried to point out that a Vulnerability in the browser has little to nothing to do with the OS it's running on. If Firefox is open to attack, it's open to attack no matter if it's running on Linux, Mac OS X or Windows (with a few exceptions here and there, of course).
Basically, the sum-total of my argument is "don't blame windows". Anyone that's using linux and knows what they're doing enough to know when something is wrong can also safely secure a Windows box. It's not rocket science, it's mostly just common sense and applies to just any OS.
"I'm a PC" (couldn't resist) and I know that if a mysterious toolbar appears, something is dreadfully wrong. Thankfully, that hasn't happened in a while. See, it doesn't just apply to Linux users, it applies to any experienced user.
At least if a big exploit comes out, the OP will be safe, but if he just "switched" to Linux and left it at that, he'd still be open to attack. And what if the attack was more malicious than simply installing a toolbar? What if it was less-obvious? Surely thinking "I'm ok, I'm not running windows!" is just going to make the situation worse?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
"If the binary isn't made for Linux nothing happens"
Yeah right! My linux machine got infected with a virus and it took forever cuz it was over 50meg download cuz it needed it installed WINE first. I wouldn't mind so much but I was connected on my 3G card, phone bill at end of the month was *massive*. At least windows can run viruses natively so they don't have to be statically linked to libwine. That saves me loads of money when I'm connected thru my mobile phone.
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%.
What if it was less-obvious? Surely thinking "I'm ok, I'm not running windows!" is just going to make the situation worse?
You're absolutely right. Security is not a product, it's a process. This is why I keep browsing slashdot and tech sites to make sure my software doesn't have a hidden vulnerability around.
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.
Easier answer: have your browser block all cookies, adding exceptions for the 20 websites you need them from (and can list off the top of your head).
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. ;)
wat
Bot Assisted Blogging
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?
Point-in-case: Being vigilant is the answer, not running a certain piece of software (or rather, not-not running a certain piece of software).
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
"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
... 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__()
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).
Point-in-case: Being vigilant is the answer, not running a certain piece of software (or rather, not-not running a certain piece of software).
Yes, but usually being vigilant implies not running a certain piece of software ;-)
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
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.