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

[Monkeedude1212]

Please elaborate Why not?

Re:Competition

[bsDaemon]

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

Re:Competition

[Keyslapper]

Agreed. The JS engine is probably the only area FF is trailing the rest of the market by a wide margin. It's not like they're announcing they're getting further out in front of the pack. Announcing they're finally coming up to par in this area is the best thing I've heard about FF since ... well ever.

This might give me reason to hold out for FF4 rather than switching to Safari or Opera.

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

[BZ]

Mozilla is not just open source, it's also open. Open in the sense that all project management (and indeed everything else) is done in the open as much as possible. There are no secret project crash landings of the sort that Chrome was or the current iteration of the Safari JS engine, unless there are external requirements for such (as there were with WebM).

This has the benefit that project contributors who are not Mozilla employees can fully participate in goal-setting and development. It does have the drawback that competitors can borrow the ideas, and possibly even ship them first; this happens all the time. This is viewed as an acceptable cost of doing business in an open way.

Re:Competition

[ultranova]

Nah. The best thing would be if they finally separated everything into their own threads so that the entire UI would not lock just because Javascript in some tab is busy, or some download stalled, or a big table is being rendered, or whatever.

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

[BZ]

Which part? Exact sources of revenue? Those are as open as the various revenue sources will allow, last I checked. Exact spending? The general categories are published; the exact salaries of particular people are not. Something else?

Re:Competition

[H0p313ss]

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

Silence, I kill you!

Re:Competition

[marsu_k]

While this is true, partially it's not FFs fault. However /. managed to get from a convoulted mess of nested tables and font tags to a convoulted mess of some of the worst performing javacript I've ever seen is beyond me.

Re:Competition

[BZ]

> Where is such information?

On the page you linked to.

> The information here is getting stale:

The 2008 information is there. The 2009 information can't be put up until the 2009 tax returns are filed, at the very least, which may well not have happened yet (depending on the exact fiscal year and extension situation; I'm not privy to the details).

Re:Competition

[drachenstern]

And yet here you are posting!

At least the trains ran on time in Italy eh?

Re:Competition

[maxume]

The 2008 auditing report and form 990 both use the calendar year, so there is a fair chance that they are using the calendar year for taxes.

It also mentions that the IRS is investigating their classification of certain income. It is sort of entertaining, their status as a public foundation is in question, so they have to ask people for donations (to try to be publicly supported), but they get far more money from their deal with Google than they are currently able to intelligently spend.

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..

Re:JägerMonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Free as in Beer

[DIplomatic]

It really blows my mind that there is such fierce competition between internet browsers. It's rare to see this level of intense drive and innovation for a free product.

Re:Free as in Beer

[BZ]

> it is merely the means to generate the real product: users.

No, the real product is an open web not tied to a particular technology. Users are just a means to that end.

> and their habits are sold to the advertisers.

What does Firefox sell, exactly? I'd really like to know.

> that money comes from selling user behavior.

Not quite. That money comes from partnerships with search engines. The only thing "sold" is whatever you decide to submit to a search engine, and only if you use the little search bar at the top right of the browser, iirc, and is only "sold" to the search engine provider (who is obviously getting that data anyway; you want them to have it so as to actually do the search).

Re:Free as in Beer

[BZ]

> 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....

Re:Free as in Beer

[bsDaemon]

It might be because they're free that there is competition to innovate. It doesn't take anything for someone to switch to a different browser, so getting them to stick with one is a bit trickier. No one is going to go into purchase rationalization mode over a free download like they might over a car that turns out not to be as cool as they hoped. From the perspective of a Microsoft or a Google, once you can lock in the loyalty of the end users, then its easier to steer them towards your other products, including for-pay products. Hell, even Netscape was giving away Navigator hoping people would pick up their server offerings to go along with it. Mozilla, on the other hand, needs to keep people in the open, standards-based ecosystem because that forces all the vendors towards the center and creates are more cross-compatible environment.

Re:Free as in Beer

[spinkham]

Exactly. Google wins if there's multiple high quality browsers.

Mozilla wins if there's multiple high quality browsers and Google keeps paying them.

Opera wins if companies continue to buy their browser engine for embedding, and Google keeps paying them.

That's 3 of the 5 major(if you can call Opera a major browser) projects that are almost entirely dependent on Google. Google ads fund the web.

Apple wins if the browsers on their platforms are good enough to allow you to leave Microsoft, and the web ecosystem allows you to not feel much pain. So they also win if there's multiple high quality browsers.

IE already won the last round. Now they have to keep from losing relevancy in the next. If people start seeing "the internets" as firefox or chrome vs IE, then people can much more easily leave Windows for Linux or Mac. The delay after IE 6 was an attempt to stall the web. They somewhat succeeded in delaying progress on the web, but lost the war, and now are scrambling to build a browser that doesn't suck.

Great... JUST GREAT

[revlayle]

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

Re:Great... JUST GREAT

[paradxum]

The Internet ... built by and ran by Drunk monkeys....

Ok, some of us are not drunk.... all the time.

Nightly benchmarking

[Mr. Spontaneous]

For those of you who want to track the progress of Mozilla's JS efforts, visit the self-descriptive ARE WE FAST YET?

Too bad FF may not last

[denis-The-menace]

Don't get me wrong, I love FF but I am worried about what happens after the deal with google expires.

FF doesn't put out an MSI version of their windows package and doesn't do GPO policies *natively*. This stuff is all 3rd party after the fact and FF updates.

Meanwhile I read on /. that Chrome can use the same GPO as IE natively. (I can't find it, though)

Once Google pumps out MSIs for Chrome and its GPO support is common knowledge, FF will have lost the corps for market share.

Re:Too bad FF may not last

[vbraga]

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

Re:Too bad FF may not last

[RebelWebmaster]

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.

Re:JägerMonkey

[shellster_dude]

Actually Mozilla uses the same terminology. See any of the data points on the graphs located at the Mozilla run: http://www.arewefastyet.com/

Re:Keyword: fast*ER* ... sometimes

[sd.fhasldff]

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.

Wha?

[ITBurnout]

Sometimes when reading Slashdot I find myself taking a step back and marveling at how a sentence like "Mozilla's new Jaegermonkey Javascript engine for Firefox, which will launch on September 1, is faster than Tracemonkey in key benchmarks" actually makes sense to me. It is the 21st Century, and we talk funny.

Too little, too late...

[divisionbyzero]

I dumped FF for Chrome a few months ago and I am not looking back... To be honest, the JS performance wasn't the main problem. It had stability and resource issues. We owe a lot to FF for freeing us from the tyranny of IE but the future is with Chrome or Safari (and to a lesser degree Opera).

Re:Too little, too late...

[SuseLover]

People keep posting that FF is unstable, but I don't get it? FF itself has almost NEVER crashed on me and I let it run 24x7x365. All of my instability problems have been due to plugins.

And I don't understand the performance complaints either, FF is maybe .5 - 1 second behind other browsers loading pages/apps. Is our society really that impatient that we can't be bothered to wait 500ms longer for something to happen?

I dumped all other browsers since Mozilla came out and I haven't looked back and I absolutely HATE Chrome (and Google - I think they strayed too far from their roots and are too powerful), so whats so damn great about Chrome other than being a little faster?

Re:JägerMonkey

[Kenshin]

"Jäger" is German for "Hunter".

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

Re:Keyword: fast*ER* ... sometimes

[bunratty]

The tracer JIT is able to compile most methods into very tight assembly code because it is able to determine the types of each variable at compile time. For the methods that can't be compiled with the tracer JIT, they have been run by the interpreter, which is very slow compared to JIT compilers. With the new method JIT, methods that can't be compiled with the tracer JIT will be run by the method JIT instead of the interpreter. This is the meaning of the statement the tracer JIT (orange) and method JIT (black) are not yet integrated. once integrated, the merged branch will be faster than either branch individually. they are complementary.

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.