
New Firefox JavaScript engine is faster than Chrome's V8 - prakash
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/09/03/new-firefox-javascript-engine-is-faster-than-chromes-v8
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pchristensen
Two words: Competition is great :)

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cbetz
I hate to point out that there are _three_ words there.

Or is this comment some kind of joke that went over my head?

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pchristensen
It was a joke. That's what the ":)" was for.

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arthurk
TraceMonkey was the fastest engine two months ago, now its SquirrelFish
Extreme.

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scott_s
Using one number to represent 14 benchmarks is meaningless. Check out the
original blog to see the breakdown by benchmark, which is more informative:
[http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/09/trac...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/09/tracemonkey_update.html)

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wesley
This is a month and a half old article, snore.

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johns
Snide comment aside, two months right now is an eternity for how fast these
engines are evolving.

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smoody
It doesn't surprise me that IE javascript performance is worse. MSoft has
incentive to keep it its Javascript engine throttled back. If it gets too
fast, then javascript-based web apps will start to perform on-par with their
office suite of apps, and then where will they be? ;-)

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run4yourlives
I don't think its so malicious. It's simply the case that MS has to support
its own JS standard, in addition to the "standard".

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snprbob86
This is exactly correct. Backwards compatability is a bitch.

Additionally, you need to account for Microsoft scale approaches. There are
two Javascript engines (that I know of) at Microsoft: IE's implementation and
Managed JScript [1] which is built on the DLR [2]. The DLR is a set of
extensions to the in-development .NET CLR 4.0 to support Managed JScript,
IronPython, and IronRuby. The DLR is the place for all these fancy pants
modern optimizations that Google, Mozilla, and Apple are implementing. In
fact, the DLR already has many of them. I believe that Silverlight 2.0 (now
released) has some version of the DLR in it and .NET 4.0 is coming sooner or
later. Who knows if or when IE will ever use Managed JScript or the DLR.

Remember: Microsoft is full of plenty of smart, non-evil engineers. You can
try to call it ignorance, but really it is bloat, process, and scope. It's
almost never malice ;-)

[1] [http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/05/04/managed-
jsc...](http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/05/04/managed-jscript-
announced.aspx) [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Language_Runtime>

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riobard
I would like Firefox to steal the one-process-per-tab feature of Chrome,
desperately. Sometimes when I have too many tabs running in the background
with just a single one stop responding, Firefox stalls for a couple of minutes
...

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shadytrees
> _Eich also praises Chrome. He says that the V8 JavaScript engine is "very-
> well engineered" and he describes the multiprocess design as "righteous"._

He went on to describe JavaScript as "totally OK" and "mauve."

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rgrieselhuber
FF3 still runs at 700 MB of RAM on my system. I've switched to Camino for
daily browsing and FF for development only. Until they fix this ridiculous
memory usage, I'm not switching back.

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zhyder
IMO chrome is overall ahead as long as it's the only browser with a separate
process per tab. (Its memory management is a nice bonus too.)

