Firefox 4 Will Be One Generation Ahead

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla's Chris Blizzard talks about the rising competition by Google Chrome, the evolution of the web platform and the prospects for WebM. He also promises that Firefox 4 will be 'one generation ahead' of other browsers in relation to Javascript speed."

Comments

Re:whoop-de-doo

[marsu_k]

Using JavaScript and HTML for the UIs of real applications remains fundamentally flawed.

Yeah, no one would seriously implement an application with the UI written with HTML, CSS and Javascript... like Firefox itself...

But in all seriousness, would you care to elaborate why Javascript (for the pedants out there, yes, I really mean ECMAScript) is so bad? I think in itself it's a fine language in itself, especially given its original purpose. Sure, it's dynamically and weakly typed, but as long as you're aware of it and its implications it's not really an issue. And being a prototype-based language is a plus in my opinion, class-based OOP wouldn't really offer any advantages in web programming, and you can emulate it if you're so inclined. Having first-class functions and closures is great, and makes up for many of the shortcomings IMHO.

No, the issues with Javascript aren't really issues of the language itself:

• Books/websites about it are in many cases outdated and/or simply wrong. As a simple example, quoting from here: If you assign values to variables that have not yet been declared, the variables will automatically be declared. (that is, omitting the var keyword) ...sure. Although you end up creating, or worse, overwriting, a global variable. But hey, same difference, right? If you really want to know the language, and not just learn some web 2.0 tricks du jour, get this book. You won't regret it.
• DOM implementations have some huge differencies. But DOM is not part of the ECMA spec, and I guess although MS has improved their CSS support, they don't want to make my job too easy. Although it's unlikely you'll notice the differences if you use one of the available frameworks (just do yourself a favor and don't use prototype.js).
• It can be used to do horrible things. And I'm not just talking about malware, Javascript is probably one of the most abused languages, in the sense what kind of websites have been created with it. Thankfully web developers seem lately to be getting the point that "even though you can, doesn't mean you should".

But again, none of those are issues with Javascript, the language, so I'd very much like for you to enlighten me.

Re:...And one generation behind on HTML5

[PerfectionLost]

+1 Hilarious.