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