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.

Comments

The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[jfengel]

Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot. For a heavily-commented article I switch to Chrome.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[rsborg]

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.

Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox

[flink]

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.

Re:In a Beta?

[The MAZZTer]

It's my understanding that feature freeze is tomorrow.

Kinda Sad

[DeionXxX]

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.

Re:Kinda Sad

[hey!]

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.

Re:Kinda Sad

[samkass]

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.

Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Are We Fast Yet?

[theY4Kman]

Check out http://arewefastyet.com/ to see the speeds of several JavaScript engines compared to Mozilla's.

Re:Are We Fast Yet?

[denis-The-menace]

OMG, all the 32bit Browsers beat the 64bit browsers!

Why did I bother for a 64Bit Windows 7 OS!

Re:I Want Advanced Blocking Capabilities

[coolsnowmen]

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