Mozilla Unleashes JaegerMonkey Enabled Firefox 4

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has published the first Firefox 4 build that integrates a new JavaScript engine that aims to match the performance in IE9 and reduces the gap to Safari, Opera and Chrome. This is really the big news we have been waiting for all along with Firefox 4 and it appears that the JavaScript performance is pretty dramatic and seems to beat IE9 at least as far as ConceivablyTech shows. Good to see Mozilla back in the game." The Mozilla blog gives a good overview of the improvements this brings; Tom's Hardware also covers the release.

Comments

The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[jfengel]

Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot. For a heavily-commented article I switch to Chrome.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[rsborg]

Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot. For a heavily-commented article I switch to Chrome.

Switch to old-style comments viewing system... I just get a dump of comments, nested appropriately. Makes for much nicer reading on a non-mobile device, albeit being a bit more bandwidth intensive initially.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed this in a recent thread with around 800-900 comments. On that note - it was infuriating that there was a 'Get More Comments' but not a 'Get all Comments' or at least a 'Get [{50,100,200}] comments' button.

I was left with the 'Press this button 20 times to get enough comments to find that +1 post' button.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[commodore64_love]

Ditto.

Plain text slashdot is the way to go. And I use Mozilla/SeaMonkey which seems to operate faster than Firefox, and has built-in Usenet support.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Seakip18]

Agreed. Even on mobile, it's much easier to go through comment threads than rely on javascript to handle it properly.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

I was reading the other day some comments regarding on how google instant is slow for some slashdotters. When I tried the new google search I was amazed that my 1.2 ghz ulv fedora netbook could run so fast. Slashdot is the slowest website I used on my 1ghz phone (hands down) - I'll give you that - but on any desktop, even a netbook I just fail to grasp why does anyone find it slow.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[clone53421]

There is a option in the account settings to control how many comments are loaded. Mine loads 250 at a time.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Teese]

Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot. For a heavily-commented article I switch to Chrome.

Is chrome the only broswer that has problems with the idle.slashdot comment thread. It anytime I try to open a closed comment, it refreshes the page and only gives me the comment, it doesn't expand the comment inline like it does in a normal comment thread. I've always been to lazy to try other broswers.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

All browsers cry when they hit Idle. I don't think it's actually a code problem, I think everything cries at the sight of Idle.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed that in FF and Chrome, the "Full, Abbreviated, Hidden" sliders don't work for Idle stories.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[cc1984_]

The site of Idle, surely?

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

This is by design. The /. employees have been trying to kill idle ever since day 1 when the PHBs forced it upon them.

The launch announcement was "from the do-not-read-the-idle-section dept." (http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/14/1512250)

Just look at the responses in this subthread from that discussion
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=646041&cid=24603867

Taco _wants_ idle to suck as hard as possible, to retain the soul of /.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[tlhIngan]

Switch to old-style comments viewing system... I just get a dump of comments, nested appropriately. Makes for much nicer reading on a non-mobile device, albeit being a bit more bandwidth intensive initially.

My trick is to load up the /. front page, then open the articles in a new tab. This hides the bandwidth usage enough that when I'm done scanning, the first article should've finished loading and I can read that while the rest of the tabs load.

I do dislike the javascript comment system for that reason - too much clicking and it's sloooooow. I'm glad /. didn't decide to do the eBay and force everyone over to the new interface with no option to switch back. About the only thing missing is a good way to quote - I think the javascript one does a nice job that embeds links and everything that the old style one doesn't.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not even punny..

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[kangsterizer]

I'm using FF on slashdot for ages never had a "slow" feeling o.o

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[CarpetShark]

Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot.

What's so demanding on slashdot? All I can think of is that you're running a browser on a sam coupe, or that your machine must be swapping so much that all javascript is horribly slow.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

no..... it would be ironic if the primary site for which you really needed a faster javascript engine was:

1) the jaegermonkey site
2) a site about writing fast javascript ....what you've mentioned is a pain or annoyance only..... not irony

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[c6gunner]

Switch to old-style comments viewing system...

How exactly do you do that? I've tried turning on and off every god damn setting in the preferences pages, and the only thing that doesn't seem to change at all is how the comments are displayed.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[flink]

How exactly do you do that? I've tried turning on and off every god damn setting in the preferences pages, and the only thing that doesn't seem to change at all is how the comments are displayed.

Go to http://slashdot.org/my/comments, and select "Slashdot Classic Discussion System", Display Mode=Nested, Sort=Highest First, and Threshold=1. Then go to http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edithome and select "Use Classic Index".

You'll now have good old classic /., the way God intended.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[spitzak]

For me in Firefox loading a Slashdot page in the background locks it up for several seconds. It seems to start about 2 seconds after the page starts loading (ie if I click quickly I can open more pages in the background) and then it locks until (I think) the page finishes loading. So this problem makes it useless. Firefox 3.6.8.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[c6gunner]

Neat. Thanks!

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[shutdown -p now]

No. I've used Opera as a primary browser and had recently switched to Chrome, but also tried FF4 beta for a while. They all have that same problem with Idle.

While we are at it, what's with iPad Safari scrolling down by some large and seemingly arbitrary amount every time a comment is expanded, or a new one is posted, in all stories (not just Idle). Anyone else seeing it? Any known workarounds? And where should I send that mail bomb?

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Runaway1956]

This happens to me sometimes. Firefox just becomes unresponsive, and I have to wait for it.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Randle_Revar]

D2 is far superior to classic, and Mozilla on Linux never seems to have speed problems (at least as long as adblock, the good contributor ad removal bonus, or the subscription ad removal is in effect).

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Lunix Nutcase]

Except that the old-style comment viewer still has the years old pagination bug.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

"You'll now have good old classic /., the way God intended."

Impossible since /. sold out repeatedly over the years.

Sorry, on the real good old classic /., there was no moderation, we could post regularly and have in-depth discussions, and I sure as hell didn't have to log in to set stupid preferences in order to view all the comments easily. Despite the rampant spam, you could read all sorts of interesting things, and people of all age groups and backgrounds participated with ease, even the spammers (which were easy to ignore).

Then /. capitulated, and kept up fixing their messes caused by them tripping over themselves. Yes, I'm one of those holdouts without an account despite reading this site since 1997. I can post, but half the time, I have to wait 30 minutes or into the next day because of the 3 post limit or whatever it is now. I find the moderation system insanely stupid, and made worse by the bad scripting, and the horrid nesting, esp. those articles with lots of comments since the next pages reiterates the nesting from the prior page, which is insane.

Yeah, I did build a little scraper to organize posts, then I gave up, since the current /. system punishes good posts anyways that are late. Or if you read /. a couple of days left and want to point out nice little resources on some of the stories (due to the posting limitation, which never existed). Anyways, nearly all those people have left the site, and there is a clear lack of depth of information, which made the point of the scraper useless (grab, download, organize by post or thread). Most threads turn into little fests of argument and counterpoints, versus actual discussions of the past.

Anyways, I've disgressed into a rant. My point is that there is no way to return the current /. back to the old classic /. Unless you meant only for account holders. And even then, well, there were many ACs that didn't have accounts but still had very cool information to share. Those days are gone.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

Noticed that as well since I use the keyboard shortcuts to open all the comments - "," a bunch of times, "[" a bunch of times, and then "g" to get comments 50 at a time until all downloaded. Just change the subdomain in the URL from "idle.slashdot.org" to something else like "i.slashdot.org" (does not matter what you change the subdomain to) and you can view it just like any other article and then use the sliders/key bindings.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[justthinkit]

Hearing this I changed mine from 100 to 250, reloaded this page and promptly got:
"(1) | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 (Slashdot Overload: CommentLimit 50)"
[i.e. it broke the thread into 50 comment pages, making things worse]

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[vlueboy]

One big feature is missing when you take this approach: the classic system lacks a "Quote Parent" button.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Scaba]

Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot. For a heavily-commented article I switch to Chrome.

You should also switch to a better dictionary.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[SethJohnson]

For me in Firefox loading a Slashdot page in the background locks it up for several seconds.

Try defragging your hard drive. Browser cache by its very design, seeks to fragment the crap out of your filesystem.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

I think everything cries at the sight of Idle

Including Slashdot readers.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[cizoozic]

Just remove "idle." from the url, and it loads the page like any other slashdot comment section.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[cyborch]

This is overwhelmingly not ironic!

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[spitzak]

I doubt that, the delay is for several seconds and only FIrefox is dead. I can launch other software while this is happening. And this does not happen with tabs other than Slashdot, even very heavy javascript and flash (they may take forever to load but Firefox works while this is happening). Only Slashdot's javascript seems to do this.

In a Beta?

[reub2000]

My understanding of the term Beta is that all features are complete. Has something changed?

Re:In a Beta?

[mcgrew]

Alpha is when code is released in-house for testing, beta is when it's released to outsiders for testing. Presumably one wouldn't release a beta unless the features were not only completed, but tested in alpha.

Re:In a Beta?

[The MAZZTer]

It's my understanding that feature freeze is tomorrow.

Re:In a Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, being in beta means the app is feature-complete, but still needs testing. The whole idea that 'beta testing' is done by the customer/public is what used to be called 'acceptance testing'.

Re:In a Beta?

[Red Flayer]

I'm going to drink JaegerMonkey all fokin night. I fokin shower in dat shit.

That's a novel approach. Normally when *I* drink Jaeger all night, I end up shitting in the fucking shower in the morning.

Seriously. That stuff is like using a brass-bristle brush on the inside of your bowels and then using clamps to pry your asshole open to give the residue unimpeded egress.

Re:In a Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously bro? That stuff is some of the lamest, weakest, poor tasting garbage I've ever had. If you think you're a man, try a whole bottle of Bacardi 151. (Appropriate catcha: downfall)

Re:In a Beta?

[flimflammer]

Like version numbers, alpha/beta/etc are subject to interpretation...

Re:In a Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not from the jaeger, that's from the ass-raping after you pass out.

Re:In a Beta?

[Mia'cova]

What you say is in line with my traditional view of alpha/beta. I think you need to accept that it's a lot more complicated than that in large software projects. Often betas are released to get customer feedback. That's an important feedback loop if you really want to nail your scenarios. Sometimes you're simply missing something.

But in this case, yea, I'd tend to agree that a lot of features are landing late. If they were being stabilized and turned on by default, that would be a lot different. Oh well.

Re:In a Beta?

[lgw]

The build numbering system in the Windows package manager is designed around major.minor.build. That simple sequential number is the third number, the first two are just there to make marketing happy. What annoys me is that last number is only 16 bits, so I can't just use the Subversion version number for it, and when I'm using SVN I'd rather stick with just it's numbering system even for builds and such.

Re:In a Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Presumably, you would be correct. Be glad you don't work tech support for the ivory tower boys at my company. Not only did they abolish the practice of releasing beta software at all, Alpha testing is as follows: Did it compile? Y=ship it. N=ship it anyway, we'll release the patch tomorrow. It's all I can do to get them to increment the freakin version number.

-if I wanted to shovel shit, i would have stayed at the water treatment plant.

Re:In a Beta?

[mischi_amnesiac]

No, that is not what we germans mean when we say "Meister"... Unless your intention was to say that you are going to drink lots of Meister Proper, a well known cleaning agent around here.

Re:In a Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like a personal problem, and maybe you shouldn't drink Jaeger anymore. I have never heard of this nor have I experienced it myself after copious amounts of Jaeger.

Re:In a Beta?

[reub2000]

No there is no formal definition to any of these terms. But these terms have commonly understood meanings, and people expect a beta to be feature complete, and the difference between 1.9.3 and 1.9.4 to be of a trivial nature.

Re:In a Beta?

[xtracto]

Question:

Is this the Beta 5?? Just yesterday I downloaded and installed beta 5.. is this the same?

BTW, Am I the only one who didn't like this Panorama (tab candy) feature? I prefer to have all my tabs as a tree-list using treestyle tab.

Re:In a Beta?

[DudemanX]

My understanding of the term Beta is that all features are complete. Has something changed?

This isn't an added feature. It's a performance enhancement. It's not like Firefox was lacking a javascript engine before this build.

Re:In a Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft, Bacardi? Shitty American alcohol. Try some real Absinthe, the 75% ABV stuff made with wormwood.

Re:In a Beta?

[LaRainette]

This is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard....

You do realize 10000 is actually much less informative than 1.9.12.2152 do you ?
Let's see about that :

A. 10000 : it gives us one, and only one piece of info, this is the 10,000th version of the software. That's all. It could be 10 major versions over 10 years or 1 major version corrected 9999 times in a month.
You have NO idea what happened to this software !

And that's from a professional point of view.
But let's go a little further : what's the difference between v10,000 and v10,001 ? You don't have a fucking idea. It could be a typo or it could be a major release with tons of new features and the (yet) unfixed bugs that come with this.

SO even from a consumers point of view it sucks, it's not easier or smarter and it certainly isn't more informative.
From my understanding the usual consumer doesn't need to know 1.9.12.2152, but he definitely will understand the difference between 1.9.12.2152 and say 2.X.XX.XXXX

Anyway I'm tired and your argument sucked so bad that I'm not going to invest anymore time counter arguing.

Re:In a Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ssshhhh don't tell him.

Re:In a Beta?

[Just Some Guy]

Normally when *I* drink Jaeger all night, I end up shitting in the fucking shower in the morning.

Remember when we were all out at the bar, and you were bitching that you needed a new place to live, and I said that my roommate was clearing out? He, um, changed his mind.

Re:In a Beta?

[reub2000]

A new feature here means a major change, one that has a high likelyhood of introducing new bugs. I know that videos on Dailymotion stopped playing in Beta 5, and I wouldn't be surprised if other sites have problems. A beta is when bugs are supposed to be fixed, not created.

Re:In a Beta?

[Ginger Unicorn]

I don't drink from the firehose, i drink from the Large Hadron Collider.

I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want most in my browser's javascript engine is the ability to block ads, popups, and to prevent outbound connections to domains other than the one I initially visited. The ability to shut javascript off altogether is also nice.

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[Shikaku]

Install ad-block and noscript.

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[Peach Rings]

Are you joking?

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[coolsnowmen]

A /. viewer who uses firefox, but hasn't heard of ad-block or noscript?
Todo list:
[ ] Turn in geek card
[ ] Write a will
[ ] Buy shotgun

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

[ ] Buy shotgun

Is it the Zombie Apocalypse already? I call dibs on Bill Murray's house.

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[Tubal-Cain]

Or Trolling.

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

no

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

A /. viewer who uses firefox, but hasn't heard of ad-block or noscript?
Todo list:
[ ] Turn in geek card
[ ] Write a will
[ ] Buy shotgun

you missed a step ;)

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[Tubal-Cain]

you missed a step ;)

[ ] ???

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[webheaded]

Seriously, and that same type of person would complain at the same time how bloated the browser is. It's like talking to a wall.

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[bre_dnd]

[ ] Purchase a life insurance policy payable to the FSF?

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

You might also want cookiesafe and ghostery.

Kinda Sad

[DeionXxX]

Anyone else kinda sad that now Firefox is playing catchup. When no one cared about JS performance, the Open Source crowd was king, then all of a sudden big corporate money was poured into JS performance and now FOSS is lagging behind.

It seems that FOSS can't compete head to head with corporate backed projects, if the corporation actually cares. For example, MS didn't care about JS performance in IE6/IE7 and Firefox was king. Now, Microsoft is trying to compete in the browser space again and IE9 is catching up in features and exceeding Firefox in certain respects.

This is coming from a very long time Firefox user, but I have definitely switched to Chrome for general web browsing. I stick with Firefox for development though because of the large amount of niche plugins specifically tailored for development.

Re:Kinda Sad

[kungfugleek]

I don't know. I think that if the big corporations are made to care about things that "common folk" care about simply because of competition from FOSS projects, that in itself is a kind of victory for FOSS.

Re:Kinda Sad

[hey!]

Why the heck should anyone be sad? One of the reasons open source is so important to the industry is to prevent the state of the art in software from becoming moribund. Microsoft practically stopped working on IE once it had what it thought was an unbreakable monopoly on browsers. Imagine where we'd be today without Firefox and the Apache Group. It might be a world of IE6 browsers served from VB ASPs on IIS 5.

Even people who don't use F/OSS benefit from it.

Re:Kinda Sad

[samkass]

When no one cared about JS performance, the Open Source crowd was king, then all of a sudden big corporate money was poured into JS performance and now FOSS is lagging behind.

Last I checked both WebKitCore and V8 were faster than IE9 and were both open source (the former LGPL and the latter NewBSD). I don't think this is a FOSS vs. Proprietary thing, just a Mozilla vs. Everyone Else thing.

Re:Kinda Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not making any sense. Firstly, Firefox isn't playing catchup as a browser just because it hasn't been a top JS performer in a while. (Was it ever? I don't recall it beating the Opera betas for any appreciable length of time.)
Secondly, the major parts of Chrome are FOSS, including IIRC the ECMAscript engine.
Thirdly, I'm not aware of IE9 actually being ahead in anything, now that Firefox has hardware accelerated graphics.

Yes, a commercial entity can indeed put together just a good a team of programmers as a random internet community. How is that in any way sad?

Re:Kinda Sad

[MBGMorden]

Big corporation and FOSS aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. I use Chromium on my Linux machines. It's open source, and it's blazing fast.

Re:Kinda Sad

[nine-times]

Isn't Chrome open source? And isn't IE9 still unreleased?

Look, there's nothing wrong with Firefox. Performance improvements are lagging a bit behind Chrome, but obviously they're working on it. It's still a great browser.

Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are all great browsers, and they're all (at least to some extent) open source browsers. When a story comes out about how Firefox is preparing a new release with substantial performance improvements, I think you have to bend over backward to turn it into a sad anti-FOSS story.

Re:Kinda Sad

[$RANDOMLUSER]

It might be a world of IE6 browsers served from VB ASPs on IIS 5.

I just threw up in my mouth a little.

Re:Kinda Sad

[D Ninja]

It might be a world of IE6 browsers served from VB ASPs on IIS 5.

:: cry :: Make him stop, mommy!

Re:Kinda Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the simple truth. Open source is excellent as long as there's nobody around. The surprising part is the brain dead geek marketing of the open source projects. It makes you think that even if they are all alone on the playground, if they don't work well they risk getting the second place.

Re:Kinda Sad

[schlameel]

With few exceptions (modern Linux, early Firefox, your-favorite-here), when is FOSS not playing catchup? I'm a big believer, but it is my experience that most F/OSS projects are a response to some commercially available / big corporate solution. Often the FOSS project provides some some feature set or widget or level of access that is an improvement over the existing package, but, as a whole the F/OSS project often lags behind bad-guy-based software. And the more UI there is, the greater the disparity becomes between F/OSS and big corporate.

Commercial software vendors would have a hard time staying in business (and plenty didn't) if they couldn't stay ahead of F/OSS.

Re:Kinda Sad

[selven]

Chromium is not proprietary.

Re:Kinda Sad

[Jorl17]

Chromium is FOSS. Chromium's JS owns. Period.

Re:Kinda Sad

[kangsterizer]

I'm pretty sure there's a name for this kind of argument, but it's basically a regular fallacy.

Firefox JS performance has nothing to do with being open source. Javascript did not matter for a very long time, it was only used for seldom tiny effects. That's why Firefox JS engine was not super high performance (albeit still much faster than anyone elses at that time), because it would have been seen as totally overkill.

Things have changed and Firefox JS is adapting. Since it's using an old codebase, it's not as quick (it took Apple quite some time to give birth to Nitro, and Google just plain bought V8 tech - as for IE9, we all know it took them time too, it's not yet there.)

And that's all there is. So much for the anti open source FUD btw.

Re:Kinda Sad

[supersloshy]

It seems that FOSS can't compete head to head with corporate backed projects, if the corporation actually cares.

Since when was javascript performance the most important feature in a web browser? If you compare all of the features Firefox 4 has to Chrome/IE/Safari besides javascript performance (which is very comparable anyways), you'll see that Firefox isn't lagging at all.

Re:Kinda Sad

[msclrhd]

Firefox has support for MathML (and has done for a long time) which WebKit and Chrome are only just starting to introduce. Firefox has just/is landing support for using SVG in img tags.

Firefox improved support for the ARIA accessibility standard in FF3, beating the support in other browsers and with no support in Chrome 1 -- http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/aria-tests/ARIA-SafariaOperaIEFF.html with an updated list at http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=474y.

There are a lot of standards out there and different vendors choose to add support for them at different times. You can pick and choose standards, or pick and choose tests, and say that any browser is better than any other browser.

Also, at the time Chrome's JIT was being implemented, Firefox were developing their tracing JIT (TraceMonkey) which they are now integrating with a Chrome-style method JIT (JaegerMonkey) to replace their older interpreter (SpiderMonkey).

Re:Kinda Sad

[msclrhd]

Also, Firefox were first to start to investigate and write code to use hardware accelerated graphics through Direct2D/DirectWrite.

At the end of the day, who was first does not matter. What matters is that we have decent performance (JavaScript, graphics and other areas) and decent standards support. Most of that was either pushed by Opera or one of the open source browsers/engines (Firefox, Chrome or WebKit). This is good for the customers as everyone gets these improvements to varying degrees no matter which (recent version of a) browser they choose.

Re:Kinda Sad

[msclrhd]

Exactly. Opera is also (from reports) a great browser and IE9 is making great strides catching up with the rest.

It also looks to be close as to when Firefox and IE9 are released to see which browser will be first to have a major release supporting hardware acceleration.

Exciting times.

Re:Kinda Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla are given millions from Google every year. Maybe they need to employ better programmers?

Re:Kinda Sad

[Flammon]

Webkit is FOSS... Catching up with who? IE9? IE9 hasn't been released yet and don't get me going about IE6/7/8. Are you talking about Opera?

Re:Kinda Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I checked, both JSCore and V8 were funded by big corporate money as well. Of course, the Mozilla Foundation has a fair amount of money, but nothing compared to what Apple, Microsoft and Google can throw around.

Re:Kinda Sad

[Randle_Revar]

It used to beat the pants off of Opera in JS. Back then Opera was generally faster in perceived page load speed.

Re:Kinda Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Firefox is bloated, and is getting more so. I think 3.0 was the turning point: the awesome bar may be awesome, but it adds 10 seconds to my start-up time. The choice to try another browser is too appealing.

Firefox still has its merits, but it is no longer king in standards, no longer faster, no longer small.

Re:Kinda Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Think what you will but I dumped Firefox after it just became too laggy and went back to IE8. Haven't looked back since.

Re:Kinda Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Catching up in features?!?!?!
Firefox is made to be extended through extensions. No way any other browser comes close to a customized installation of firefox.

Re:Kinda Sad

[hkmwbz]

When no one cared about JS performance, the Open Source crowd was king

I'm afraid that isn't quite accurate. Opera was the performance king, and it peaked at 9.5 when it was so much faster than everyone else, Safari included, that Apple decided they needed to do something different. That's when they started work on JavaScript JIT.

Opera was always the fastest, and with the new Carakan and Vega engines, it's currently tied with or a little bit ahead of Chrome.

Re:Kinda Sad

[hkmwbz]

Actually, Opera's JS engine is faster than V8.

Re:Kinda Sad

[Jorl17]

Yes, but Opera isn't FOSS, whereas Chromium is. And OP was saying that FOSS didn't get "good" performance anymore, that they "lagged behind". Well, FOSS may not be "the best", but it certainly isn't "lagging behind".

Re:Kinda Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

It shouldn't be surprising that people who get paid to do a job usually outperform people who volunteer to do something when they have some spare time.

Re:Kinda Sad

[hkmwbz]

I was referring to the claim that "When no one cared about JS performance, the Open Source crowd was king." As in, the past. But in the past, too, Opera was the performance leader. It's true that FOSS isn't lagging behind anymore, though. Actual competition rocks.

Re:Kinda Sad

[Jorl17]

Ah, sorry, I didn't get that! Also, I didn't know that Opera was the performance leader back in the past. But, oh well, in the past I wasn't born.

Who cares?

[ickleberry]

I would rather they focus on making things other than JavaShit faster, i try to leave it switched off when I can. I don't use Slashdot 2.0 or Web 2.0 apps so JavaShit speed is pretty much irrelevant to me.

Re:Who cares?

[Myopic]

Who cares? You can't make a guess at answering that question? Okay I'll give you the answer: everyone but you.

Re:Who cares?

[Dusty]

Not exactly everyone but you. I'd guess anyone, like me, who blocks almost all Javascript is going to find an improvement in it's execution speed fairly irrelevant.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you've never heard of "noscript" or the number of times it's been downloaded.

Re:Who cares?

[AnonymousClown]

JavaShit - I like that.

Unfortunately, there are a bunch of business and finance websites that I use that have JavaShit all over the fucking thing and the only way to see their content is to have JavaShit turned on. And then you have these websites that have so many JavaShit shit on their websites that you can't click on things because they have these JavaShitty popup bullshit that gets in the way.

I think there should be an operating system written in JavaShit that web developers would have to use by law - JavaShit OS. Build it on top of MS DOS. That'll slow'em down.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to break it to you but that's not very common.

To pedantically expand:

Who cares? Everybody except the exceedingly small segment of the Internet populace who does not now, and never ever will, use javascript extensively (either as a consumer or as a development).

Re:Who cares?

[deek]

I've downloaded "noscript", but I allow scripts globally, and mark specific websites as untrusted. More websites these days require javascript enabled for best use.

Re:Who cares?

[boteeka]

I would rather they focus on making things other than JavaShit faster, i try to leave it switched off when I can. I don't use Slashdot 2.0 or Web 2.0 apps so JavaShit speed is pretty much irrelevant to me.

You being the minority exception.

The big news we have been waiting for?

[Just_Say_Duhhh]

If this is "really the big news we have been waiting for all along," then we can officially proclaim this as a Slow News Week!. Who didn't expect Firefox 4 to beat IE9 and narrow the performance gap to Safari, Opera, Chrome? Wake me up when Firefox 4 blows them all out of the water!

Re:The big news we have been waiting for?

[Peach Rings]

It's not really news we've been waiting for anyway when all the work has been public all along.

Re:The big news we have been waiting for?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is "really the big news we have been waiting for all along," then we can officially proclaim this as a Slow News Week!.

Who didn't expect Firefox 4 to beat IE9 and narrow the performance gap to Safari, Opera, Chrome? Wake me up when Firefox 4 blows them all out of the water!

So next month then?

http://arewefastyet.com/

Take a shot of Jaeger

[MrEricSir]

And cheers to the release!

Re:Take a shot of Jaeger

[coolsnowmen]

Were you in a fraternity?

Re:Take a shot of Jaeger

[EdIII]

Funny you mention that.

I imagine Chrome had a really cool name for the javascript engine build that would make me think of advanced sentient computer systems processing my JS at blinding speeds while still deciding on whether or not to wipe humanity from the Earth....

Then I see the name JaegerMonkey and envisioned a drunk little monkey inside my computer throwing poo at the screen....

Re:Take a shot of Jaeger

[MrEricSir]

No, but my vacuum cleaner was stolen from one. In my defense, I'm sure they had no use for it anyway.

Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox lagged chrome mostly because firefox cares a LOT more about compatibility, and adding all this crazy JIT compiled JS stuff is hard when you're trying to support all the introspection features which people have been using in firefox.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

If they had stuck to real standards in the first place instead of offering "do not use this wink wink" nonstandard features.

The reason HT(X)ML advanced at all was because browsers implemented "wink wink" non-standards.

Remember CSS? That wasn't standard.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason for that is that Mozilla is honest. Unfortunately, honesty is rarely appreciated.

Opera and Webkit just added little tricks to pass the ACID 3 tests. They don NOT really correctly support all the stuff that ACID 3 is testing.

It's comparable with graphics drivers that include tricks to score higher in specific benchmarks, but do not really make the graphics card faster. It's simply cheating.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Focussing too much on the acid3 test, or any other scorecard list of features, is bad for Web Standards.

You'll find that the Webkit developers have outright states that they have bare-minimum implementations for some standards just to pass the last few points of acid3 that isn't really usable. Hixie listed as one of his bullet points of lessons learned to focus more on useful web standards rather than just any old non-widely-implemented standard.

Re:Compatibility

[Intron]

Firefox lagged chrome mostly because firefox cares a LOT more about compatibility, and adding all this crazy JIT compiled JS stuff is hard when you're trying to support all the introspection features which people have been using in firefox.

Firefox cares about compatibility? Are you kidding me? Reported: 2000-03-28

Doing a basic html element wrong for 10 years is not compatibility.

Re:Compatibility

[Dalzhim]

As a matter of fact, not fixing this particular bug maintains compatibility with web sites that used to rely on this "feature".

Re:Compatibility

[electrostatic]

Firefox lagged chrome mostly because firefox cares a LOT more about compatibility, ...

I wish Firefox could display my Netflix queue properly. It's impossible to delete an item that shows the DVD/Bluray listbox: the delete icon is lost.

I was forced to use IE but now there's the IE Tab Plus addon that invokes the embedded IE engine in a FF tab. Mediocre solution.

Re:Compatibility

[shutdown -p now]

I rather strongly suspect that the real reason for them getting this late is the well known fact that Mozilla codebase is a horrible mess that is a pain to work with (in general, and specifically as opposed to Chrome).

I also suspect that IE lagging behind has to do with similar reasons.

Re:Compatibility

[hedwards]

Well, if the acid tests didn't involve purposely broken broken it wouldn't be so bad. But really, rather than kowtowing to random tests, perhaps it would make more sense to actually worry about the things which matter.

Re:Compatibility

[BZ]

Like most "well known facts", this one is more of an urban legend than anything else. Whatever you may think of the Mozilla codebase (and it's not as painful to work with as people seem to think; Webkit used to be somewhat simpler when it did a lot less and got more complicated as it gained feature parity), the JS engine was never a horrible mess any more so than any other JS engine I've read the source for. And I've read the source of at least V8, JSC, and Spidermonkey at some length.

One thing it _did_ have against it is that it wasn't designed from the ground up to work with a jit, unlike V8. And reworking an existing codebase to a new design while keeping API compatibility (which Spidermonkey has aimed to do until recently) is much harder than writing something from scratch. For example, some optimizations that make a lot of sense in an interpreter are actually slowdowns when you're using a jit; several such had to be effectively undone before the jit could get faster.

Re:Compatibility

[BZ]

What's interesting about conformance tests is that unless they're exhaustive the only thing you can tell from them is how much a browser cares about conformance... by looking at the score when the test is first published, before people go and fix just the issues that are tested for.

As far as I know Opera is not "cheating" on its sputnik results but is in fact "cheating" (in the effect of implementing effectively bare-minimum functionality needed to pass) on some of the Acid3 bits. Precisely the ones Firefox is not passing, as it happens.

Re:Compatibility

[cyclomedia]

Unless firefox has magically cleaned up its entire tree in the past 4 years I can tell you it's absolutely evil, entirely hard-coded around hacks and assumptions about how a page is laid out, at least that was the way it was when I was building it. I was trying to make a start on a basic HTML5 feature: The ability for form inputs to be able to exist separately from the form in the control tree (by specifying [input form=bar] to link it). Was there a nice neat "Form Business Logic" object somewhere that was triggered with a list of all the stuff in the form that simply iterated over a standard get-me-your-submit-value interface for each? no, it was some freaky "munge everything under the form in the DOM tree into a bath, stir and hope that the [input] controls float to the top so we can forcibly scrape the crap out of their innards into something resembling a POST".

Even trying to get a button to submit a form that it wasn't physically inside was subjected to this, the click event kinda walked up the tree to see if there was a form to submit somewhere up there, it worked in a similar way to the Kicks did in Inception and once you were in this kind of "Submit Form" mode there was no way of getting back at the button that initiated it so that you could just check for the existence of a "form" attribute (or a "formaction" one, which allows you to set the destination on the fly from the button) to do essentially a getElementById() on it.

That and the fact that you needed an assembler, python, gawk AND perl alongside your C++ compiler meant that (again, in 2006 at least) it wasn't a horrible mess at all, it was a total mindfuck, like coding inside a Cronenberg movie.

Re:Compatibility

[Just Some Guy]

Well, if the acid tests didn't involve purposely broken broken it wouldn't be so bad.

The Acid tests are unit tests for browsers. When you write unit tests at work, do you only check for correct results with good data or do you also check that your programs handle bad inputs gracefully? Of course Acid tests are purposefully broken. Every good unit test in the world is.

Re:Compatibility

[BZ]

> Unless firefox has magically cleaned up its entire tree in the past 4 years

So about half the life of the project? A lot of cleanup has in fact happened, yes.

> Was there a nice neat "Form Business Logic" object somewhere that was triggered with a
> list of all the stuff in the form that simply iterated over a standard
> get-me-your-submit-value interface for each?

You mean like this function?

  nsHTMLFormElement::WalkFormElements(nsFormSubmission* aFormSubmission)
  { ...
      PRUint32 len = sortedControls.Length();
      for (PRUint32 i = 0; i SubmitNamesValues(aFormSubmission);
      }

Sure looks like a standard interface for each control that tells it to add itself to the data being submitted. Just querying the "submit value" wouldn't work as well, since some of the values are strings and some are sets of multiple strings and some are stream objects representing files on disk.

Oh, and this code has looked like this since 2002, so it was certainly like this in 2006 when you say you looked at it.

> The click event kinda walked up the tree to see if there was a form to submit somewhere
> up there

Are you and I looking at the same code? The default click event handling on a submit control just fires a submit event at its mForm member. As long as your mForm is set right, it'll Just Work even if the isn't inside the in the DOM. Which is no surprise, because the way HTML parsing works that happens pretty often. So it has to be supported.

You do have to have the mForm member set correctly, of course.

> which allows you to set the destination on the fly from the button) to do essentially a > getElementById() on it.

Sounds like you were doing this completely backwards, for what it's worth. The right way to handle [input form="something"] is to set the mForm based on the "something". Then everything else should more or less Just Work. The complications arise from the fact that the element "something" references can change; in 2006 there was no good general system for keeping track of such changes; now there is.

> That and the fact that you needed an assembler

Unlike what other open-source layout engines? Heck, chromium includes a third-party assembler as part of their source checkout because they depend on it for vp8 stuff.

And on the other hand, if you're compiling C++ I figure you have an assembler installed already, right? So what's the issue?

> python, gawk AND perl

Yeah, the fact that multiple scripting languages are used in the build system is somewhat of an annoyance if you change the build system and reflects the fact that different scripting languages were popular in 1998 and 2006 and that rewriting a bunch of perl in python is low on the priority list. How does that affect the readability or editability of the codebase, though? Unless, as I said, you're changing the perl parts of the build system, in which case you have to read perl.

Re:Compatibility

[BZ]

Er, slashdot totally munged the source there.  The relevant function is:

998 nsresult
999 nsHTMLFormElement::WalkFormElements(nsFormSubmission* aFormSubmission)
1000 {
1001   nsTArray<nsGenericHTMLFormElement*> sortedControls;
1002   nsresult rv = mControls->GetSortedControls(sortedControls);
1003   NS_ENSURE_SUCCESS(rv, rv);
1004
1005   //
1006   // Walk the list of nodes and call SubmitNamesValues() on the controls
1007   //
1008   PRUint32 len = sortedControls.Length();
1009   for (PRUint32 i = 0; i < len; ++i) {
1010     // Tell the control to submit its name/value pairs to the submission
1011     sortedControls[i]->SubmitNamesValues(aFormSubmission);
1012   }
1013
1014   return NS_OK;
1015 }

Re:Compatibility

[hkmwbz]

Mozilla, honest? Heh. They've been spewing FUD and lies about Opera for years, for example.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Sputnik is an exhaustive Javascript test and Opera does, by far, better than any other browser. Do you have any proof that Opera cheats on Acid3?

I don't know if you're a Firefox fanboy or what, but you seem to be coming up with all sorts of excuses like one.

Re:Compatibility

[t_ban]

Opera and Webkit just added little tricks to pass the ACID 3 tests. They don NOT really correctly support all the stuff that ACID 3 is testing.

What is the source of your information? Did you work at either of those places? You seen the code?

what hardware for video

[Taibhsear]

Anyone know what hardware they were using in the demo video (tom's hardware) to get the 12fps and 91fps comparatively. Is this the kind of performance increase the average user will see or just people with high end systems?

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Matching IE is back in the game? Since when...

Humorously, my captcha reads "nonsense"

Re:Huh?

[Tubal-Cain]

IE 9 betas, I think.

4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[StuartHankins]

Slashdot is quite perky with the last couple of betas. But it's especially disheartening that the video "upgrades" in this most current release fall short on my platform. When viewing the demo page ( http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/ ), I get 1 fps. I get 6 fps when running the same demo on Firefox inside a Parallels Windows XP SP3 VM. The VM is significantly faster... which boggles the mind actually.

So far as I remember, this was an Apple issue not necessarily a Mozilla issue, but still disappointing.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[rjstanford]

Huh. I get Safari=7, Chrome=5, and Firefox3.6.9=3 running that test on a pretty recent MacBook Pro - current stable versions of each, I believe.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[AhabTheArab]

I'll have to try this on my Mac Mini. I just tried Firefox/4.0b6pre on my Lenovo T500 running 64 bit Arch Linux: 2fps - and it severely impacted overall performance while it was running. I fired up Chromium 7.0.515.0 on the same machine and scored 26 fps with no performance problems. TFA said it had to do with directX, so I don't think Macs would see a great increase either.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[Anonymous Coward]

7 FPS on Firefox 3.6.8 on an old 2GHz A64 running Linux 64-bit

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[donutello]

8 core Mac Pro with 10GBs of RAM and I only get 5fps on Safari and 2fps on Firefox.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[kangsterizer]

72 fps , FF4b4 Linux, i7620m

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[kangsterizer]

should have included it but oh well:
6 FPS , chrome 6.x Linux i7 620M

i'd say firefox is a bit faster. lol.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[omni123]

Slashdot is quite perky with the last couple of betas. But it's especially disheartening that the video "upgrades" in this most current release fall short on my platform. When viewing the demo page ( http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/ ), I get 1 fps. I get 6 fps when running the same demo on Firefox inside a Parallels Windows XP SP3 VM. The VM is significantly faster... which boggles the mind actually.

So far as I remember, this was an Apple issue not necessarily a Mozilla issue, but still disappointing.

I find it funny that Chrome gets a 6 on this 'stress test'.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[Anonymous Coward]

13 fps on Opera 10.61 on Win7 x86

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[Tubal-Cain]

When viewing the demo page, I get 1 fps. I get 6 fps when running the same demo on Firefox inside a Parallels Windows XP SP3 VM. The VM is significantly faster... which boggles the mind actually. So far as I remember, this was an Apple issue not necessarily a Mozilla issue, but still disappointing.

I also get 1 fps (Debian unstable).
I think the current beta's start page announced hardware acceleration in Windows.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[xororand]

92 FPS with
Browser: Firefox 4.0b4 (64-bit), haven't gotten around to compile the latest beta yet
OS: Debian GNU/Linux amd64
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.6 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GTX 260

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[lymond01]

Err...it tells me 17fps. Windows 7, FF 3.6.9

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[Anonymous Coward]

13 fps on Opera 10.61 Win7 x86....

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[cuby]

I've got 30 fps. Results of 1 or 2 fps are very strange and I think they are related to non Firefox issues.

Firefox 3.6.9.
Ubuntu 10.04.1
Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz
GeForce 9400 GT (with nvidia driver)

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[Anonymous Coward]

I get 50fps in Firefox 3.6.9 on a system with a AMD Athlon X4 945, 55 with compiz turned off.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[rjstanford]

I'm betting that screen resolution makes a pretty decent difference for some systems - FWIW, my numbers were at 1920x1080. All tests should be valid when compared against different browsers on the same machine, though.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[Anonymous Coward]

i take it you missed the bit where firefox hardware acceleration currently only uses direct2d
which means no support on mac / linux yet

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[orangeplanet64]

IE9 platform preview, 67FPS. on quadro fx 570m

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[tenco]

3 fps on FF 4.0b5 on an Atom N450

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[westyvw]

I am using Iceweasel 3.5.12 from Debian Sid and I get 59 FPS. 1680x1050 many tabs open and downloading and running lucky backup....

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[ferrocene]

Sweet, I get 100 FPS, which looks like the max. CPU never goes over 8%. Server 2008 R2, FF4 b6pre (Minefield), 1920X1200, i5-750 @ 4.0Ghz (170x24), Nvidia 8800GT.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[MrCrassic]

The reason why it's so slow for some people is because it might still be CPU-bound. It's not using OpenGL on OS X yet, for instance.

More information here.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[zigurat667]

In the source you can see the canvas is fixed at 1900x1200. The framerate was virtually the same for me, even when resizing the browser window to 1x1 or not showing it at all. As long as the acceleration works, these result should be expected as everything is drawn to an offscreen image.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[timmans]

On Ubuntu 10.04.1 x86-64, Nvidia GeForce 8500GT, 4gb RAM, Core2Due E7400 I get:

Firefox 4.0b6pre: 52fps
Firefox 3.6.10pre: 47fps


Certainly has no problems on Linux.

Re:4.0b5 on Snow Leopard

[StuartHankins]

Yes, I also tried Minefield. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b6pre) Gecko/20100912 Firefox/4.0b6pre

Still 1-2 fps.

This is on a 2007 MacBook Pro, 4 GB RAM, GeForce 8600M GT (has 256MB dedicated memory) at 1440x900 on a single display.

anyone else

[Charliemopps]

anyone else not really care about Java performance? it works for me, thats all I care about. Until the other browsers have adblock and Noscript they are all dead to me.

Re:anyone else

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda surprising that someone around here doesn't get the difference between Javascript and Java.

Re:anyone else

[nschubach]

You mean Javascript? ;)

I care a lot about it. As a partial JS developer it means I can do more without lagging the heck out of my users. I can create more complicated fun stuff instead of doing bare minimum. I can run that extra DOM check that I was scared to do previously looking for items that match some jQuery string. There's just so much more than that and those just sound like the "lazy" stuff.

(It's not about laziness of coding... more: "I can't add this because..." -- I do interactive stuff in Flash/JS/etc. I welcome faster scripting in any language.)

Re:anyone else

[moonbender]

YHBT?

Re:anyone else

[cptnapalm]

Err, wouldn't faster JavaScript + more JavaScript = lagging the users, same as now?

Re:anyone else

[Anonymous Coward]

anyone else not really care about Java performance? it works for me, thats all I care about. Until the other browsers have adblock and Noscript they are all dead to me.

Yeah. I'm running Lynx as my default browser. I don't care about JS performance, because I never visit any site designed after 1995.

Web apps? Who needs 'em! Why use a web app when you can download some source and compile your own binary!

Web 2.0? Hah! I'm still on Web 0.3 beta, and I'm lovin' it.

Re:anyone else

[ascari]

As a partial JS developer

Which part? Or should I better not ask?

Are We Fast Yet?

[theY4Kman]

Check out http://arewefastyet.com/ to see the speeds of several JavaScript engines compared to Mozilla's.

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[denis-The-menace]

OMG, all the 32bit Browsers beat the 64bit browsers!

Why did I bother for a 64Bit Windows 7 OS!

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[aztracker1]

> 4GB of addressable memory spac without kludgy hacks. Better OS stability and use of CPU features (nx bit)... SSDs tend to work better with OSes that support TRIM.. there's plenty of reson beyond 64-bit apps... even MS recommends using 32bit office.

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you perhaps have a computer with >4GB of RAM you'd like to use?

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[jesser]

The JaegerMonkey team understands why it's currently slower on 64-bit than on 32-bit. One reason is that the larger pointers on 64-bit systems don't play well with the value representation. If that can be fixed, perhaps by using a different value representation in 64-bit versions, it might end up faster on 64-bit than on 32-bit.

They're working on speeding up the 64-bit version. They have to, because of the plan to ship Firefox 4 as a 64-bit application for Mac OS X 10.6 ;)

(Btw, arewefastyet.com shows speeds of naked JavaScript engines, which are usually slightly faster than JavaScript engines inside web browsers.)

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nitro is faster running on x86_64. Bear in mind that http://arewefastyet.com/ does not show browser based comparisons. It runs the JavaScript engines independent of the browser.

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[Randle_Revar]

8GB

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the FAQ - there are some x64 specific optimizations that haven't been made. It even points to a bug where the x86 code-path is actually worse on x64.

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[bill_mcgonigle]

It wasn't too long ago that I checked and JM didn't even run on x86_64. I'll take it as it is!

This silly little netbook I'm typing on now is even x86_64. It's running the _old_ Firefox JavaScript VM (and so Chromium will pants it).

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[SheeEttin]

Read the FAQ, #8.
It's slower now, but once it's been optimized for 64-bit it'll be as fast, if not faster. Meanwhile, your machine is probably faster in other ways.

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[bill_mcgonigle]

it might end up faster on 64-bit than on 32-bit.

Are they simply porting the 32-bit machine to 64-bit, or intelligently using 64-bit capabilities (I'm thinking about the expanded register space specifically)?

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[jewelises]

PAE

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[BZ]

Register allocation is handled separately on x86-64 and x86, yes.

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

>3GB/process

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[denis-The-menace]

So *today* Firefox is faster if I run 32bit Firefox on 64bit Windows 7.
64bit Firefox will eventually be same speed or faster.

Correct?

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully for the security and 64 bit ability. and not just to load pron faster.

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[SheeEttin]

In terms of JavaScript benchmark execution, yes.

Just one of the necessary features

[CAIMLAS]

So, they introduce a faster Javascript engine. Good for them; they've got a working prototype/alpha of 1/4th of the necessary features to catch up with everyone else, at this point:

* multiprocess functionality
* security mechanisms resulting from said multiprocess functionality
* better thread/tab/etc. management

At this point, the only thing Firefox has going for it is adblock and the huge extension repository. Even then, its debatable: Chrome, for instance, seems to implement most of the extensions I used natively, and does it better than Firefox extensions did, to boot. (Most of which were only necessary to make up for FF shortcomings, like crashing.)

Honestly, the very first thing FF should be working on is multiprocess shit. It's big, bloated, and at this point, somewhat archaic in architecture - the code base is over 12 years old, isn't it?

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[coolsnowmen]

Is the multiprocessor functionality of chrome optional? That is, I like the fact that a bad page ( usually bad java script or flash ) can only hang one core and not my entire processor.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[cynyr]

Also does the FF3.0 JS engine work on AMD64 linux yet?

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[Anonymous Coward]

Are Chrome's ad-blocking extension finally blocking them from downloading/processing in the first place? Or do they still get downloaded and run but are "hidden"?

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[MacTenchi]

Agreed. They are working on multiprocess, it's called Electrolysis. It's very quiet, so I imagine they're behind schedule. It's also my impression that it's a very small team.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? I've never had a problem with Firefox on AMD64, even with 32-bit support disabled in my kernel.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[Yvanhoe]

adblock is a total must-have, IMHO. Also a good feature about firefox is that you can trust it to not send all your traffic informations to Google...

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[Xtravar]

Chrome does not support the HTTPS Everywhere extension. Once it does, I may switch. But privacy is my first concern when using the web.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[internettoughguy]

So, they introduce a faster Javascript engine. Good for them; they've got a working prototype/alpha of 1/4th of the necessary features to catch up with everyone else, at this point:

* multiprocess functionality
* security mechanisms resulting from said multiprocess functionality
* better thread/tab/etc. management

At this point, the only thing Firefox has going for it is adblock and the huge extension repository. Even then, its debatable: Chrome, for instance, seems to implement most of the extensions I used natively, and does it better than Firefox extensions did, to boot. (Most of which were only necessary to make up for FF shortcomings, like crashing.)

Honestly, the very first thing FF should be working on is multiprocess shit. It's big, bloated, and at this point, somewhat archaic in architecture - the code base is over 12 years old, isn't it?

Perhaps they should just ditch the Gecko/GTK combo and adopt Qt, Webkit and V8, what's the point in trying to compete when they could just assimilate :).

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[darrylo]

Unfortunately, this is really needed to address the firefox "memory problems". Leaky extensions and the like are a fact of life. With chrome, it's a matter of bringing up the chrome task manager and kill the offending web page. With firefox, I have to restart the entire browser.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[kangsterizer]

The point is that multiprocess, except for plugins (which is already done) isn't a big advantage at all.
They actually implemented it on Fennec, that's Firefox mobile if you prefer, because it would yield an advantage here.

On regular desktops, not so much, in fact, it uses quite some memory. It's not because "others do it" that it's necessarily "teh future embrace or die!".

It also encourage sloppy programming since it's more fault tolerant, chrome tabs crash all the damn time in comparison to firefox which barely ever crashes.
Non-plugin code should _never_ crash, ideally.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[omni123]

adblock is a total must-have, IMHO. Also a good feature about firefox is that you can trust it to not send all your traffic informations to Google...

AdBlock exists for Chrome.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest version catches a lot more but it may still download them. Chrome doesn't provide the hooks necessary to prevent or filters arbitrary urls.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[holloway]

AdBlock exists for Chrome.

And it usually downloads the adverts before deciding to hide them

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, the very first thing FF should be working on is multiprocess shit. It's big, bloated, and at this point, somewhat archaic in architecture - the code base is over 12 years old, isn't it?

I actually found this particular phrase pretty "funny" and so i downloaded the latest Chrome available on the Google website, fired up both browsers after a quick reboot and proceeded to browse the web as usual ( i replicated everything i did on one browser in the other ) and then i checked a few numbers.

Using Ubuntu 10.04 x86, Firefox 4.0b6pre ( nightly build ) and Chrome 6.0.472.55, Adobe Flash 10.

After an hour of browsing and opening 40 tabs ( the all kept open ), a few youtube videos seen and my memory usage is as follows :

- Firefox 296.6MiB
- Chrome 467.1MiB

CPU Usage Flash 10 Video

- Firefox 480p 4%
- Firefox 720p 12%

- Chrome 480p 16%
- Chrome 720p 54%

After closing every tab but two ( ./ and youtube video playing )

- Firefox 183.2MiB
- Chrome 187.1MiB

So to me as an end user, it's actually Chrome who is bloated and big. I don't care about source code line count and how big it is on the hard drive in this day and age.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[TrancePhreak]

That makes no sense. Unless you were referring to opening [N cores] pages.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[Lennie]

It's not completely quiet, the Fennec (Firefox Mobile) beta or alpha version already has it. And they are working on improving on it. Multiprocess is very high on my list though, It it is probably the feature I want the most.

The trick is Firefox is the browser which uses the least amount of memory by some test (there are very little tests being done). This is where multiprocess is going to be interresting to watch, I think that is why they started on mobile.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[Lennie]

Yes, I've had Chrome tabs crash on me many times as well. Actually Firefox Betas are more stable.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[MacTenchi]

Big advantages for me outside of isolating crashes:

1. Isolating misbehaving webpages from the rest of the browser. In Firefox, runaway Javascript on one tab can slow down or freeze other tabs or the whole browser.

2. Solve the memory leak from fragmentation problem. Closing tabs in Firefox often doesn't decrease the amount of memory consumed.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[Anonymous Coward]

Both AdBlock and AdThwart for Chrome no longer download ads before blocking.

Opera's built in ad blocking doesn't either.

Or you could use PeerBlock to block ads and questionable connections from all of your internet connected applications.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[hedwards]

Precisely. It's taking more time for Mozilla to do it because they're not doing it the easy way. They could've had it done quite some time ago if they just made them completely separate processes with a third party task bar. However they're going beyond that. They're pooling some of the resources to hopefully keep the bloat down, and trying to focus the separation on portions of the process which really need it.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[CAIMLAS]

What?

I have 8 cores. I open 5 tabs, creating 5 processes. One tab crashes. One process crashes. The remaining 4 remain as they are; usually, it's quite simple to regain the crashed page by loading it.

With stock firefox, that usually means pulling each of those 5 pages out of history again, after restarting the whole browser.

As far as "hanging one core and not the whole processor" you do realize that in a modern operating system, processes are not inextricably linked to a core? If your whole system locks due to the browser hanging, that's poor system design (Windows, Mac) or failing hardware.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[CAIMLAS]

Still "hidden" I am afraid - as far as i know. I heard rumor that there's a native-and-real adblock, but I've yet to bother to seek it out.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[CAIMLAS]

I'd agree there, sometimes. I've run Chrome for weeks without a single hickup, as well.

Unlike Firefox crashing, which often requires a 'reboot' lasting up to a minute on a modern machine (if you're using session manager or the like), a single tab requires ctl-R to be hit, once - and it's instantly back (often/sometimes with session data). That's stock, mind you. Firefox, on the other hand, records no such thing, and even with Session Manager will often lose session data (whether it's opened tabs or things typed in the crashed windows).

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[CAIMLAS]

OK, you're right: I should not have said "bloated" and "big". I should have said "slow as fuck and bloated".

Leave your browser open for the better part of the day, and let me know how Firefox performs (vs. Chrome). Night and day difference.

I can't even watch 720p stuff on some of my computers with Firefox - not if I want to be doing anything else. (These are single core systems.) Chrome handles much better in the same (limited memory) environment.

That said, recent Chromium builds have had some pretty severe memory leaks.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[koiransuklaa]

Both AdBlock and AdThwart for Chrome no longer download ads before blocking.

Except that chrome just doesn't let you do that for everything. Even the adblock page says "a few resources might still load before AdBlock can get to them".

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[koiransuklaa]

Sure. On the other hand, competition is what got us this far. Having only one html engine or js engine that actually improves isn't necessarily a good thing.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[vlueboy]

If your whole system locks due to the browser hanging, that's poor system design (Windows, Mac) or failing hardware.

Or your IE box just got owned and spyware needs to be removed from it.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[omni123]

Both AdBlock and AdThwart for Chrome no longer download ads before blocking.

Except that chrome just doesn't let you do that for everything. Even the adblock page says "a few resources might still load before AdBlock can get to them".

Part of that is actually due to the speed of the rendering and how the extension API is handled. Sometimes extensions just can't get to elements before the browser renders them (in Google's mind the browsers primary function comes first, a good step imo, to prevent all the bloated crap that exists in some FF addons).

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[badkarmadayaccount]

Get a descent GC, people! There is no such thing as a memory leak in JS. If there is, the GC isn't good enough.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[darrylo]

A GC doesn't help you if FF or an extension continually allocates memory and adds it to a persistent data structure, like a list. Most GC's also don't address memory fragmentation issues, which prevent process size shrinkage.

Chrome's approach of having a separate process per tab will help you with both of the above. Yes, it's arguably kludgy, but it's a great workaround. It just works.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[Anonymous Coward]

It's useful because, assuming they do manage to get JS and layout to run in the content process, it means one tab loading will no longer block a totally different tab from responding to the user.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[badkarmadayaccount]

Heap partitioning can help combat fragmentation and GC overhead (not to mention many modern GCs handle fragmentation better than the underlying OS, which is all you have with traditional memory management). Data persistence bugs are to be fixed, not worked around, and some better memory profiling tools would be a great help.

Re:Just one of the necessary features

[coolsnowmen]

You are right, I should have said it that way.
I have a 3 core processor, and typically have about 10 pages open.

Wrong versions in summary

[radish]

The linked article is about 4.0b6-pre which is the first version to include JaegerMonkey. The other two links are to articles about the public release of 4.0b5, which doesn't include JM (it's headline feature is really the DirectDraw support on Windows).

4.06-pre isn't currently being pushed to regular beta testers AFAIK.

Re:Wrong versions in summary

[xtracto]

Aha! thank you! I was wondering what beta version was that because just yesterday I downloaded b5 and after testing I thought it was still quite sluggish.

Re:Wrong versions in summary

[ferrocene]

Yeah I'm running Minefield 64bit 4.0 b6pre. It's super fast...

Fails the old acid2 test though

[codeshot]

The acid2 test has the nose of the acid face half a pixel too high.

Re:Fails the old acid2 test though

[iYk6]

The acid2 test has the nose of the acid face half a pixel too high.

Firefox 3 and 3.6 have the same problem. I think Firefox just isn't acid2 compliant yet.

In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Mozilla unleashes Jaegermeister enabled monkey on YOU!

Back in the game?

[yoyhed]

Seems like they're shooting pretty low by trying to match IE9's performance. Chrome, Safari, and Opera are all still kicking ass in the JavaScript speed space - come on Firefox, I want to go back to you but you still waste an entire bar of vertical screen space on the titlebar (MOVE THE TABS UP THERE) and JS performance is still going to be subpar?

Re:Back in the game?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're getting pretty close to matching chrome and safari: http://arewefastyet.com/ ... and getting there without breaking backwards compatibility horribly like chrome and safari have.

Re:Back in the game?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are annoyed about the vertical space caused by the title bar you should not be using a window manager that has title bars. Also, you can move the contents of the navigation bar into the menu bar (unless you are on Mac of course).

Re:Back in the game?

[omni123]

I wish I could mod this flamebait. The early preview speed tests for IE9 compete with Chrome very well.

Re:Back in the game?

[Fnkmaster]

According to http://arewefastyet.com/ they have come from being 2x-3x slower than Safari and Chrome a few months ago (v8/sunspider benchmarks) to being within a few percent to 25% of Safari and Chrome, depending on the benchmark.

I think that's pretty impressive - it basically puts them in the right ball game now, and narrows the performance gap to the barely noticeable range for most practical purposes.

Re:Back in the game?

[FraGNeM]

Press F11.

I never understood the demand for "tabs on the title bar", personally. It's just 30 pixels (using Win 7, no scaling).

How many toolbars could you possibly have that you can't spare the 30 pixels?

Re:Back in the game?

[compro01]

If they do decide to play follow the leader with the tab bar, I hope they include the option to have it the normal way. The taps-at-the-top UI bugs me as I then have to move my mouse that much more to switch tabs.

Re:Back in the game?

[jesser]

The option is available. Right-click a toolbar and uncheck "Tabs on top".

Re:Back in the game?

[tenco]

It's just 30 pixels

Common screen resolution on netbooks: 1024x600

Re:Back in the game?

[yoyhed]

It's not about the mouse distance traveled - it in fact takes LESS time to pick tabs that are on top because you can slam your mouse to the top of the screen - you don't need to spend the extra time precisely choosing your Y coordinate, only the X. Same reason it's nice that in Windows, the close button (even though it doesn't physically touch it) can still be hit by slamming your mouse into the upper right of the screen. It's basically a gesture at that point, not a precise move and then click.

Re:Back in the game?

[yoyhed]

I don't use any toolbars - I just like more viewing space. There's literally nothing on the top bar except the menu button and close/minimize buttons - why not use that space for tabs like Chrome? The title of the tab is the same title that'd be in the titlebar anyway, so you don't really need a titlebar. And yeah, on netbooks, Firefox can be really annoying on some sites.

The main thing, however, is not even the screen space - it's the fact that it's even FASTER (despite your mouse traveling a smidge further) to have the tabs at the very top. This is because it doesn't require precise Y-axis movement to within a 30-pixel-tall space to choose a tab, you just slam your mouse to the top and make sure the X-coordinate is within the 150px or so that the tab takes up.

Re:Back in the game?

[yoyhed]

I use Windows, and if I was using Linux I sure as hell wouldn't be on something like Fluxbox just because Firefox can't have an efficient UI like Chrome and Opera.

The menu bar doesn't exist in Firefox 4 without pressing Alt - all there is, is the menu button at the top-left, in the titlebar. A titlebar isn't necessary and is a waste of space, because the title is on the current tab anyway. That's one logical reason to put the tabs where the title and a bunch of empty space would be.

Another is that it's faster/easier to select tabs if they're against the top of the screen (assuming a maximized window) - because it doesn't require precise Y-axis movement to within a 30-pixel-tall space to choose a tab, you just slam your mouse to the top and make sure the X-coordinate is within the 150px or so that the tab takes up.

Re:Back in the game?

[yoyhed]

I take that part back; upon seeing some tests from June, IE9 does compare favorably with Chrome/Safari/Opera. I was basing my comment on some older tests I'd seen of IE9, wherein they were nowhere near as fast as the Webkit browsers.

Besides, do you really blame me for assuming a release of IE is going to be shit? :-)

Re:Back in the game?

[hkmwbz]

I don't think it's very impressive at all. They've been bragging constantly about how they would be the fastest browser ever, and all they did was to barely catch up?

When Opera released the new JIT engine, Carakan, it was well ahead of the rest with the first public release. No bragging and empty claims beforehand. Just actually delivering on performance. Mozilla, on the other hand, is still mostly talking and bragging...

Hyperbolic flamebait

[FranTaylor]

the only thing Firefox has going for it is adblock and the huge extension repository. Even then, its debatable

Apparently access to source code and the ability to be compiled and run on platforms like BSD and Solaris doesn't count for anything any more.

Re:Hyperbolic flamebait

[omni123]

Apparently access to source code and the ability to be compiled and run on platforms like BSD and Solaris doesn't count for anything any more.

If you are one of the 97% of the web who doesn't care about this, yep, that's exactly right. This hardly makes it hyperbolic flamebait because Firefox contains 1 feature that you personally benefit from--all of the other features he mentioned are almost "must-haves" for mum and pops and their flash games.

You should be more interested in making the use of FOSS more widespread for good reasons; not the pretty fact that you can install it on whichever random OS you choose to run on your desktop.

Re:Hyperbolic flamebait

[EmagGeek]

No, it really doesn't, especially when 90% of the users are non-programmers who just want it to work.

Re:Hyperbolic flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome is open source too. Don't know if it can be compiled, presumably it can, but if it can't is it really important?

Re:The're going to need to do a lot more than that

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're so concerned about speed, why don't you just go use Lynx? Or, better yet, why not cut out the middleman, telnet to port 80 and send your http requests manually?

Microsoft Beta, Alpha, RTM

[HannethCom]

I disagree, Microsoft ships many products feature incomplete, so they wouldn't even qualify as Beta quality.

Windows Vista for example was supposed to ship with EFI and Video Desktop Backgrounds support. These didn't come until later.

Some of the software engineers on Windows 95 and 98 have complained that some of the code they finished the day of RTM was in the RTM build with no testing done at all.

TFS 2005 was being sold and delivered before the client tools were completed.

Basically I think I'm saying at Microsoft alpha = RTM

Mozilla chose DirectX not OpenGL

[Burz]

...for their acceleration. Pretty friggin sad.

It is a MOZILLA issue.

Re:Mozilla chose DirectX not OpenGL

[msclrhd]

On Windows they use DirectX and also use Direct2D/DirectWrite if available (Vista or later).

On Linux, they use XRender (2D) and OpenGL.

On Mac, they use the relevant Mac APIs, including IIRC Quartz.

This is like what games do when they choose between DirectX 8/9, DirectX 10/11 and OpenGL. I bet Chromium, WebKit and Qt do similar things for their accelerated graphics.

I'll stick with Firefox only

[Anonymous Coward]

... until the day I can get AdBlock for another browser.

I'm fine with looking at ads -- it's how the Internet works and remains "free". I am not, however, fine with looking at adds when they often contain malware delivered simply by viewing the ad.

Re:I'll stick with Firefox only

[kangsterizer]

actually chrome has a real adblock now
but i'd still stick to firefox for other reasons

Competition

[microbox]

It's called competition, and it's what we really, really need in the software industry.

Tom's Hardware hiring homeless crackhead "writers"

[hessian]

From the Tom's Hardware article:

If you were waiting for the version of Firefox that takes advantage of your new ATI or Nvidia GPU. If you've got Windows 7, you'll want to check out the latest Firefox 4 beta.

What kind of illiterate wrote this mess? If I ever find myself homeless and down to my last rock, I know where to apply for work.

Let me get this straight

[EmagGeek]

They have a new engine, which hasn't been released yet, which still won't make them as fast as Safari or Opera, and we're supposed to be wowed by this?

How about they make a browser that doesn't crash daily and consume 2GB of memory after 12 hours? Then, I'll be wowed.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, if you weren't using a 4 year old version, your problems would just go away.

alternatively

[roman_mir]

alternatively have a can of this drink

Re:The're going to need to do a lot more than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Iron is a joke. It's nothing more than a rebranded Chromium that some guy thought he could get rich off of.

Chromium Notes: The story of Iron
Is Iron a Scam? Yes

While Iron does not provide extra privacy compared to Chromium, it does disable some configurable Chromium features that could share information with third parties.

Gah, yuck

[Anonymous Coward]

When will a browser maker realize that Javascript sucks donkey balls, and instead worry about implementing some truly modern web standards instead of accelerating the bejeezus out of that stinking pile of horse shit?

The article summary is bad

[Jugalator]

The two last links have nothing to do with JaegerMonkey (and only Direct2D + HTML5 Audio), so they are not links giving on overview of this feature. They discuss the latest beta release, not the merge with JaegerMonkey on the trunk / nightly builds.

Quite slow C64 emulator

[Per Wigren]

I'm running the latest build right now (on OSX) and the pure JavaScript C64 emulator is still quite a bit slower than in Chrome but it's still a LOT faster than previous Firefox versions.

Why oh why

[ferrocene]

Why oh why did they move the refresh button to the right side of the address bar? That's so many pixels away...

Re:Why oh why

[skrugen]

Luckily F5 is right where it has always been on the keyboard.

I pulled all the buttons off my firefox toolbar except 'Stop'. F5 refreshes, CTRL-F5 reloads, ALT-left or right arrow goes forward & back.

BTW, you can customize the toolbar and put that refresh button wherever you want it. View > Toolbars > Customize.

Mods on crack

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to drink JaegerMonkey all fokin night. I fokin shower in dat shit.

How the fuck is this redundant?!

Re:Mods on crack

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to drink JaegerMonkey all fokin night. I fokin shower in dat shit.

How the fuck is this redundant?!

He does this every night.

Firefox 4.0 b6 NOT released yet

[surveyork]

Firefox 4.0 b6 has not been released yet. However, the pre-release versions (Minefield) are available here

Good thing!

[jseale]

Several websites I deal with won't even work with Chrome, Bleacher Report and the PogoPlug GUI are a couple of 'em. Don't know why I even left FireFox in the first place. Geez!

Kinda impressive, actually

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure there's a name for this kind of argument, but it's basically a regular fallacy.

Firefox JS performance has nothing to do with being open source. Javascript did not matter for a very long time, it was only used for seldom tiny effects. That's why Firefox JS engine was not super high performance (albeit still much faster than anyone elses at that time), because it would have been seen as totally overkill.

Things have changed and Firefox JS is adapting. Since it's using an old codebase, it's not as quick (it took Apple quite some time to give birth to Nitro, and Google just plain bought V8 tech - as for IE9, we all know it took them time too, it's not yet there.)

And that's all there is. So much for the anti open source FUD btw.

Also, it pays to look at the development trends. In preparation for Firefox 4.0, Mozilla has been working to improve their tracing engine (called Spidermonkey I believe), and at the same time develop and then tune a JIT compiler. Mozilla has designed these efforts to be complementary, so that they could be merged to get the best of both approaches. The combined javascript engine has been dubbed JaegerMonkey.

Mozilla development first merged these two different methods into the one engine only about two weeks ago, and now they are tuning it. Here is their record of how they have been going:

http://arewefastyet.com/

The trend is very interesting, is it not? The very first test of the combined engine, JaegerMonkey, was between a 10% and 35% improvement, depending on the benchmark.

If the trend holds true to form, JaegerMonkey will be the fastest javascript engine of all in somewhere between one and three weeks time.

So much for the FUD that "FOSS always lags behind". Due to JaegerMonkey and hardware accelerated rendering, Firefox 4.0 has a decent shot at becoming once again the speed king of all browsers.

Mozilla chose DirectX AND OpenGL AND Xrender

[Anonymous Coward]

...for their acceleration. Pretty friggin sad.

It is a MOZILLA issue.

Actually, depending on the platform, Mozilla chose DirectX AND OpenGL AND Xrender.

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/

You need to check your facts before you post.

What about fixing bugs?

[alexo]

There are several bugs that make FF a pain to use for me (although I still use it because of the plugins).

* Bug 490122 - Firefox periodically becomes unresponsive/freezes: video jerks/pauses/halts; links, tabs, menus stop responding.

* Memory leaks: FF memory use grows to ~1.5GB and then it hangs with 100% CPU usage.
it may be a plugin or GM script issue but I could not isolate it. Seems to happen more frequently when browsing picture-heavy pages (google image seach, galleries, etc.)