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Mozilla Unleashes JaegerMonkey Enabled Firefox 4

Posted by timothy on from the some-big-hype-to-live-up-to dept.

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.

6 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox by rsborg · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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  2. Re:In a Beta? by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's my understanding that feature freeze is tomorrow.

  3. Compatibility by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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

      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.

    2. Re:Compatibility by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  4. Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox by flink · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.