New Firefox JavaScript engine is faster than Chrome's V8 | Hacker News Reader

New Firefox JavaScript engine is faster than Chrome's V8

arstechnica.com

19 pointsprakash17 comments

Two words: Competition is great :)

I hate to point out that there are three words there.

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

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

It is indeed - but at what point are they fast enough and attention should be put on to (presumably) non JS items like DOM manipulation ?

(or are they related, I know nothing about browser design other then how to write for them or use them, a bit).

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

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...

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

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

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? ;-)

I hope MS continues to think that way, it will only make them irrelevant sooner.

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".

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... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Language_Runtime

Microsoft already has a much faster Javascript engine in Silverlight, but they would need to make big changes in IE to integrate their next-generation Javascript implementation into it.

Besides, the IE team's approach to performance is different than Mozilla's and Apple's approach. Instead of just improving raw performance, they look at entire use cases and try to optimize them for usability and performance. To the IE team, a 50% increase in some artificial benchmark means nothing, but a 50% decrease in the number of steps and/or the amount of wall time for the user to accomplish a task is very important.

Here is what they had to say about their integrating their new Javascript implementation into IE:

Chris Wilson [MS] (Expert): Q: Why not adapt the the Silverlight implementation of (managed) Javascript and fit it in IE.next? It's fast as hell. A: We've been looking at Javascript engines closely. The transitions back and forth between managed code (JScript.Net) and unmanaged code (IE's DOM) would be expensive, though, so it's not as much of a slam dunk as it might seem.

- http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/chats/transcri...

By the way, once a month you can join one of those chats and ask the IE developers any question you want.

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 ...

> 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."

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.

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.)

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