Mozilla Unleashes JaegerMonkey Enabled Firefox 4

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Mozilla Unleashes JaegerMonkey Enabled Firefox 4

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 9, 2010 @08:27AM 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.

32 of 279 comments (clear)

The Slashdot Firefox Paradox by jfengel · 2010-09-09 08:31 · Score: 4, Interesting

Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot. For a heavily-commented article I switch to Chrome.
1. Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox by rsborg · 2010-09-09 08:35 · 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:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox by Teese · 2010-09-09 09:03 · Score: 3, 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.
  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.
  
  --
  "I'm a Genius!"*
  
  *Not an actual Genius
3. Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox by Anonymous Coward · 2010-09-09 09:12 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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.
4. Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox by flink · 2010-09-09 11:48 · 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.
In a Beta? by reub2000 · 2010-09-09 08:37 · Score: 3, Interesting

My understanding of the term Beta is that all features are complete. Has something changed?
1. Re:In a Beta? by The+MAZZTer · 2010-09-09 08:41 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  It's my understanding that feature freeze is tomorrow.
2. Re:In a Beta? by Red+Flayer · 2010-09-09 09:24 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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.
  
  --
  "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
3. Re:In a Beta? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-09-09 10:13 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  That's not from the jaeger, that's from the ass-raping after you pass out.
4. Re:In a Beta? by LaRainette · 2010-09-09 23:25 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  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.
Kinda Sad by DeionXxX · 2010-09-09 08:43 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
1. Re:Kinda Sad by hey! · 2010-09-09 08:59 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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2. Re:Kinda Sad by samkass · 2010-09-09 09:02 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  E pluribus unum
3. Re:Kinda Sad by nine-times · 2010-09-09 09:13 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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.
4. Re:Kinda Sad by $RANDOMLUSER · 2010-09-09 09:24 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  It might be a world of IE6 browsers served from VB ASPs on IIS 5.
  
  I just threw up in my mouth a little.
  
  --
  No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Re:Who cares? by Myopic · 2010-09-09 08:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

Who cares? You can't make a guess at answering that question? Okay I'll give you the answer: everyone but you.
Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities by Shikaku · 2010-09-09 08:48 · Score: 3, Informative

Install ad-block and noscript.
Compatibility by Anonymous Coward · 2010-09-09 08:50 · 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 · 2010-09-09 09:25 · 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 · 2010-09-09 09:37 · 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.
3. Re:Compatibility by BZ · 2010-09-09 17:17 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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.
4.0b5 on Snow Leopard by StuartHankins · 2010-09-09 08:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.
Are We Fast Yet? by theY4Kman · 2010-09-09 08:55 · Score: 5, Interesting

Check out http://arewefastyet.com/ to see the speeds of several JavaScript engines compared to Mozilla's.
1. Re:Are We Fast Yet? by denis-The-menace · 2010-09-09 09:35 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  OMG, all the 32bit Browsers beat the 64bit browsers!
  Why did I bother for a 64Bit Windows 7 OS!
  
  --
  Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
2. Re:Are We Fast Yet? by jesser · 2010-09-09 11:55 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  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.)
  
  --
  The shareholder is always right.
Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities by coolsnowmen · 2010-09-09 09:09 · Score: 4, Funny

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
Wrong versions in summary by radish · 2010-09-09 09:09 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Re:Back in the game? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-09-09 09:31 · Score: 3, Interesting

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:Just one of the necessary features by MacTenchi · 2010-09-09 09:37 · Score: 3, Informative

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.
Hyperbolic flamebait by FranTaylor · 2010-09-09 09:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

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:Back in the game? by omni123 · 2010-09-09 10:26 · Score: 3, Informative

I wish I could mod this flamebait. The early preview speed tests for IE9 compete with Chrome very well.
Re:Back in the game? by Fnkmaster · 2010-09-09 10:55 · Score: 3, Informative

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.