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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.
My understanding of the term Beta is that all features are complete. Has something changed?
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.
Who cares? You can't make a guess at answering that question? Okay I'll give you the answer: everyone but you.
And cheers to the release!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Install ad-block and noscript.
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.
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.
Check out http://arewefastyet.com/ to see the speeds of several JavaScript engines compared to Mozilla's.
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
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.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish I could mod this flamebait. The early preview speed tests for IE9 compete with Chrome very well.
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.
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.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers