Firefox 4 preview knocks back Jäger shot Mozilla has released preview builds of Firefox 4 that include JägerMonkey, the new JavaScript engine extension designed to outpace rival engines from the likes of Google and Opera. According to the open source outfit's latest SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks, JägerMonkeyed Firefox still trails all major competitors, but on the …
are some benchmarks comparing this to Silverlight & Flex. From my own personal testing Silverlight seems to run about 20X fast than flex due to JIT vs interpretation. Javascript is really an apples to oranges language since methods, classes, properties, and anything else can be changed dynamically at run time. But most of the time that doesn't happen, so I would think that JIT compilation should place JS at around 90% performance compared to native code.
Oh wait, here they are... thanks Google
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3851
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/E2E-Tracing-JIT-and-SPUR/
if MS and Apple hadn't joined the standardisation process . And I'm sure channel9.MSDN is really unbiased.
I've not actually found a site (that I would want to use anyway) that has JavaScript slowness problems. Pages running slowly due to shit design yes, but not problems due to javascript running slowly.
I mean, to me, as a user? (I'm not an IT professional, more a tinkerer, so there's a risk I'm going to sound dumb here)
Has JS performance been so bad in the past that it noticeable worsened a user's experience? Are computers of (say) the last three years still not powerful enough work with inefficient JS engines without delaying a web page for a couple of seconds? An extra 2 second delay would irritate me, for sure.
My gut feel is that slow-loading sites are a whole lot more problematic, and this is all a silly pissing contest between rivals chasing headlines. But as I said before, I'm not an IT pro....
I refer the honourable gentleman to the following badly-named Reg article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/07/google_buckyball_doodle/ - "Larry and Sergey's HTML5 balls drained my resources"
I presume the speed of the Javascript engine in Firefox 3.x (whatever Ubuntu has updated it to) is why, when I read the article and went to the Google home page on my six year old laptop, I failed to see what all the fuss was about as it was as smooth as silk.
With the canvas tag, WebGL, and fast javascript, it is no longer just a language arrange web pages, it is a full fledged competitor to SIlverlight and Flex.
This isn't about web pages any more. It is about vector graphics based client side programming akin to WPF or anything else.
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