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.
Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot. For a heavily-commented article I switch to Chrome.
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.
Check out http://arewefastyet.com/ to see the speeds of several JavaScript engines compared to Mozilla's.