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Firefox pulls a Dr Frankenstein and bolts on WebKit JavaScript engine to speed things up
After we reported that Mozilla is working on a new, faster scripting engine -- JägerMonkey -- it has now come to light that Apple's WebKit project and its JavaScript native code generator JSCore will be the 'secret sauce' that speeds things up.Firefox already has strong code optimization in its current JavaScript engine (TraceMonkey), but in terms of actual code generation Adobe's nanojit component has always been a little on the slow side. When Firefox had only IE7 to compete with, no one noticed -- then along came WebKit! With so many better options -- Chrome, Safari, Opera 10.50 and its lightning-fast Carakan -- there is a rapidly receding list of reasons to use Firefox.
That's why Mozilla's going to simply tear out Adobe's naff nanojit, strap on Apple's JSCore... and voila! Faster JavaScript! The wonders of open-source! Let's not forget that Firefox also borrowed code from Chromium for the out-of-process plug-ins -- and presumably, when per-tab processes come in, they might be borrowed from elsewhere too.
Let's hope Mozilla brings greater original innovation to Firefox this year. 2009, with its Personas, was a little flat.
[via Ars Technica]
Comments
7
Subscribe to commentsNickMar 9th 2010 1:44PM
Why not? Firefox already uses Google's Incognito code.
I believe Chromium also uses a lot of Mozilla code, including revisions of NPAPI.
It's pretty common in the open source world, fortunately.
AemonyMar 9th 2010 2:47PM
I just hope, like you, that Firefox brings something more innovating than their Persona add-on. That just felt lame and they made it even worse by bundle it with Firefox 3.5.
But still, I'm looking forward to the speed increase. It's always something, but I'd be more happy with a speedup on their regular renderer and not the javascript engine.
By the way, does anyone here know if you can disable the per-tab processes in browsers? I'm not so fond of having multiple processes just for a single browser, and tend to see it as a decrease in speed if you're like me and opens hundreds of tabs in minutes and then closing them again in mere seconds (opening tabs that contain images, then saves the images and closes the tab when done). All that creating and deleting processes has got to be an extra slowdown.
Sebastian AnthonyMar 9th 2010 7:31PM
Well, it's not in Firefox yet (but you can disable the out-of-process plugins I think).
Not sure if you can disable per-tab processes in Chrome. A quick Google would tell you...!
hmmMar 9th 2010 11:47PM
You can . You need to add the –single-process switch to the shortcut. See here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-cool-tricks-to-put-some-more-sheen-on-google-chrome/
I didn't try it on Chrome but only in Chromeplus which has the options in the GUI. I have to say it made things very unstable and the browser was crashing every now and then.
DamianMar 9th 2010 6:14PM
Good coders write code, great coders copy code.
Electrolysis was not a simply copy, it took the best bits and re-worked the worst bits of Chrome . And this isn't a 1 way street, open source engines Gecko and Webkit have been looking at how each other do things for some time now.
Also they'll still be using nanojit and Tracemonkey, it's faster when it works, it just doesn't work in 100% of all cases.
Sebastian AnthonyMar 9th 2010 7:30PM
Indeed... why reinvent the wheel?!
I thought nanojit was being retired, but I might've read it wrong :)
BazMar 10th 2010 7:40AM
Not sure we really need a Frankenbrowser. What we really need is for Firefox to be re-written so its smaller, a lot less power mad and will open (and close) quickly and cleanly. One fears just tacking on bits to an already (increasingly) clunky browser will not resolve these issues.