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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."

6 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Re:JägerMonkey by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The correct transliteration of German umlauts ä, ö and ü is "ae", "oe" and "ue". JaegerMonkey is correct.

  2. Re:Free as in Beer by BZ · · Score: 3, Informative

    > But there will be no winner.

    No winner in terms of market share, right?

    If that happens, it's a win for Mozilla, at least, since their goal here is a free and open web, not controlling how users get information. Firefox having 100% market share would be a loss for Mozilla....

  3. Re:Keyword: fast*ER* ... sometimes by sd.fhasldff · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think you're missing the point of what is being benchmarked. Mozilla hasn't released benchmarks of their new JS engine with both "method" and "tracer" JIT combined. They are being evolved separately, but are (according to Moz) complementary. Thus, we don't know how far they actually are from their goal yet.

    Check out http://www.arewefastyet.com/ for benchmarks and description.

    From what I can gather from the associated bug report, the "fatval" optimizations are also not applied to the portions of JS code that is traced... which would imply that the better job the tracer engine does, the less the "fatval" optimizations are applied.

    The result is that an unknown "free" speed increase is waiting in the wings. What the magnitude of this increase is... well, that's the question, isn't it?

    Does 1 September seem like a really tight deadline? Yes, sure does, but more in terms of stability and robustness than actually getting to a specific speed milestone.

  4. Re:Too bad FF may not last by vbraga · · Score: 4, Informative

    I never understood why Mozilla Foundation refuses to release proper GPO support in Firefox. Why neglect the corporate market?

    --
    English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
  5. Re:Too bad FF may not last by RebelWebmaster · · Score: 4, Informative

    For what it's worth, there was a session on enterprise deployment at the 2010 Mozilla Summit last week. Official MSI support is coming (there are patches posted to the relevant bug), hopefully for Firefox 4. GPO support is more difficult due to the wide number of settings supported by Firefox and complications with their version numbering and update settings. That said, there are extensions for it at least. Basically, that segment is getting more attention, even if it isn't moving at lightning speed.

  6. Re:JägerMonkey by Kenshin · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Jäger" is German for "Hunter".

    Once again we're treading into the territory: Can you be sued for using a word?

    --

    Does it make you happy you're so strange?