JavaScript in Firefox 3.1 will be wicked fast
John Resig of jQuery fame, has a post about a huge performance boost coming to Firefox 3.1: TraceMonkey.
TraceMonkey, Resig explains, uses a computing technique known as trace trees (PDF) which adds just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey,
Firefox’s current rendering engine.
What does this mean? As Resig explains:
It means that JavaScript is no longer confined by the previously-challenging resource of processing power. With this improvement it’s leap-frogged any sort of traditional and has gone head-to-head with computationally-powerful languages like C.
In other words, we’ll get JavaScript processing speeds that are Usain Bolt-on-crack fast, opening the door for more powerful JavaScript-powered applications.
Firefox’s announcement comes a few months after the WebKit team’s announcement of SquirrelFish, which will be the JavaScript engine used in Safari 4.
Resig and Brendan Eich also point out that these TraceMonkey improvements (and presumably SquirrelFish’s improvements) in conjunction with HTML 5’s canvas element will mean we’ll see some slick JavaScript animation and game experiences, such as this one by Zachary Johnson.
The obvious roadblock to widespread adoption of all of this whiz-bangy JavaScript+<canvas> goodness is, of course, Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 7 does not support the canvas element. Version 8 of the browser will not, although there is a workaround for IE7 available.
Still, without the dominant web browser on board — and conceivably not coming on board for at least a few years — the widespread use of JavaScript animations may not take off for some time.
Want to check see TraceMonkey in action? Download a nightly build of Firefox (codenamed Minefield), and in the about:config panel, set javascript.options.jit.content equal to true.
Also check out Mike Schroepfer’s screencast What can you do when your browser is 7 times faster?
This is what Doug Crockford at Yahoo! wrote about JavaScript: “I teach that if JavaScript were infinitely fast that most web applications would run at about the same speed.” However, he knows that Firefox people know this and this makes Doug optimistic.
[http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB0li?p=872]
Hi,
Do you use Firefox on your mac or Safari?
Personally, I would love to but I can never get torrents to work with the latest firefox.
Something about firefox not having permissions to use the download directory.
I understand, this is not tech support but as a computer savvy person, you might know
I use Firefox. I’ve never tried to use download torrents using Firefox. I think Opera has a BitTorrent client built-in.