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

Mozilla is dead as a user browser

[BitZtream]

Okay, obviously not, its got its fair share of the market.

My thought here is however, instead of working on things that aren't really that important, how about they step back and focus on making Firefox not suck.

You know, like back when it was simple and didn't try to be the worlds browser testbed?

I embed Gecko in a couple applications, using it because I get a 'web' rendering engine (lets face it, HTML isn't enough anymore) AND XUL which means I can create a common GUI using XUL and not maintain different bits of code between MacOS and Windows.

I think this statement about new the javascript engine is my final nail in the coffin for switching off Gecko to WebKit. (No, its not a new statement nor is my decision a new one)

Embedding Gecko is an absolute mess. You've got the nasty XUL runner distro you need to embed in your app, you've got path issues to worry about so your app can FIND all the mozilla DLLs and thats just Windows. Have fun embedding Gecko into a plugin bundle used by another app on Mac OSX. Yes, I've done it, but holy shit is it a complete mess.

I've got 5k lines of code or more just to make a wrapper around gecko that will let me load gecko on Windows in multiple apps without having to write the same thing over and over again to do nothing more than load gecko, get a XUL window and get a result from it.

I started transitioning my first app to webkit last night. In a few hours I had about 8 lines of code that got me a browser window to preview html in.

Mozilla spends all their time playing with new stuff, which is fine and good for the web, but I'm done tracking Mozilla sources and dealing with their bugs. Without a real commercial drive behind them, Mozilla is simply two unreliable for me as a developer to depend on them. If I had more resources on my end to work around issues in their code base it might work.

Mozilla spends time doing silly shit like new ways to make themes and other silly crap that generally isn't ever a good idea, regardless of how you implement it ('theming' and 'skinning' apps is retarded, sorry if you're one of those people but it should be such a low priority that it should never get time devoted to it). The result is that Mozilla's code base is a bloated, buggy, mess of code that no one can figure out.

Its filled with GREAT ideas, but no one stopped to ask if the ideas where GREAT in the context of 'a web browser'.

Mozilla is simply a sandbox a bunch of devs use to try out their latest code on the unsuspecting masses, this is just another example.

Great, your javascript engine is faster. How about you stop worrying about beating someone elses javascript engine and start fixing the bugs and bloat that cases it to crash before finishing the test 2 times in a row.

Your browser is fucking worthless if its too much of a mess to be usable, regardless of how fast one little bit runs.