Slashdot Mirror
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.
Who cares? You can't make a guess at answering that question? Okay I'll give you the answer: everyone but you.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
E pluribus unum
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?
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.
Kinda surprising that someone around here doesn't get the difference between Javascript and Java.
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.
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
That's not even punny..
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.
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.
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).
This happens to me sometimes. Firefox just becomes unresponsive, and I have to wait for it.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br