Mozilla's New JavaScript Engine Coming September 1

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has reached an important milestone as its new JavaScript engine, 'JaegerMonkey,' is now faster than the current 'TraceMonkey' in a key benchmark. Mozilla wants JaegerMonkey to be faster than the competition and launch on September 1, which means that JaegerMonkey will make it into Firefox 4.0."

Comments

Competition

[Dan East]

I know Firefox is open source, but is it wise to broadcast their intentions so publicly months in advance? Especially when it has to do with competing against other browsers.

Re:Competition

[bsDaemon]

Because the Taliban might start training their monkeys to interpret Javascript, too.

Re:Competition

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Everybody knows that everybody is trying to buff their JS scores; both because the Web2.0 gods demand it, and because not having the best sunspider scores causes your e-penis to shrivel. It isn't exactly a skunkworks secret weapon kind of feature.

The only way that they could really hide from a remotely sophisticated adversary(ie. a group that includes anybody remotely capable of making a competing browser), would be to sacrifice openness in a pretty huge way and make it so that only internal devs could see commits and things being made. If they aren't doing that, they aren't actually hiding much of anything.

Plus, since JS performance is such a point of competition, pre-announcing your coming-real-soon-now feature is a way of encouraging people not to defect to competing products before the feature is actually released.

Re:Competition

[Big Boss]

The new and improved TalibanMonkey Javascript engine! It flies code into large webpages and DDOSes any script that mentions Muhamad. :)

Re:Competition

[Arancaytar]

It's not exactly a huge leap of innovation, since monkeys already writing Javascript.

I can't explain some of the code I've seen, otherwise.

Re:Competition

[H0p313ss]

Because the Taliban might start training their monkeys to interpret Javascript, too.

Silence, I kill you!

Re:Competition

[drachenstern]

And yet here you are posting!

At least the trains ran on time in Italy eh?

Re:Competition

[StikyPad]

You're thinking of AlQuedaMonkey. TalibanMonkey tally me bananas.

Re:Competition

[Vectormatic]

You sir, made my day, and in lieu of a mod point, have this coupon, good for one free internets!

damn, if only i hadnt pissed away my mod points earlier today..

Great... JUST GREAT

[revlayle]

Drunk monkeys are going to be running the new JS engine.... still better than IE

Using the wrong benchmark...

[bradbury]

The speed of Javascript is the *least* of my critera to use in judging a browser (seems like reviewers and developers are operating under some misguided credo where "foreign" software providers running unexamined software ON MY MACHINE is a *good* thing. While open source, an Internet site is free to change their Javascripts at the drop of a hat (unlike an open source browser where one at least some has some community review and reasonable confidence in security/reliability). So any web site which uses Javascript is open to compromise and therefore could become a mal-Javascript distributor.

If the purpose of HTML and Standards is to distribute *information* and not to use *my* CPU cycles or sell me things (aka distribute commercials) I'd be much more interested in browsers that use the fewest CPU cycles in an unused state (or a "used" state displaying static HTML) or reliably restore sessions when requested.

The overemphasis on how fast Javascript runs seems to be due to a lack of serious thought as to how to make browsers better at doing what they were designed to do -- which was *not* to run "web-apps". We used the Internet very successfully for over a decade to provide information -- not to run apps -- if it wasn't (isn't) broken why the emphasis on fixing(?) it?

I note this with an aside that the U.S. Government (NIH NCBI) no longer allows complete access to its *public* databases, e.g. PubMed, by browsers which do not have Javascript enabled. (One is compelled to ask *who* for the most part paid for that information but can no longer access it?).

A "good idea" is something which doesn't break something which used to work just fine when it is supposed to be improving on it.