In a recent interview with derStandard.at Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard talks about the rising competition by Google Chrome, the evolution of the web platform and the prospects for WebM. He also promises that Firefox 4 will be “one generation ahead” of other browsers in relation to Javascript speed.
They aren’t even the same generation yet:
http://arewefastyet.com/
Keyword “yet”.
There are plenty of bugs open in mozilla’s bugzilla that describe what needs to be done to speed up JS in Firefox. Who knows if it’ll be possible to do all that for Firefox 4.0, but it shows they do know what needs work.
Also, your link shows both engines (TraceMonkey and JaegerMonkey) separate. The plan is to use both engines together, each doing what it does best. This page shows it: http://arewefastyet.com/?machine=6
Getting the heuristics right will be one of the difficult parts, but you can see the progress in the v8bench results.
I’m a Netscape -> IE -> Mozilla Suite -> Firefox user.
I was not afraid to change from Netscape to IE when I realized IE was much better than Netscape 4.5.
I was surely happy to come back to Mozilla Suite when I realized how much better Mozilla Suite was compared to IE.
And I was very happy to jump boat to Firebird as soon as it was usable.
I have tried Opera since the times it fit a floppy, and I could never get use to it.
I even tried kameleon, safari, and countless others.
I mean, I’m not married to any of the browsers, so i’m not worried to change.
I have been trying Chrome weekly, and while it is a great browser, the truth is that it is not as fast as people claim. At least not to me.
Chrome is fast only for the first tabs. But if you are like me, and have near 20 to 40 tabs open you would start seeing not only how much memory it uses, but how slow it makes the system in general, and Chrome in particular.
And I have a 4GB i3, with Windows 64 bits.
Maybe Chrome takes 200 ms vs firefox 300 ms at doing some weird Javascript, but for me, Firefox is much more responsive than Chrome.
And Chrome does not even have real extensions.
Yes! Your progression sounds like me, right down to trying Opera and Chrome.
If you’re like me and have 100 to 300 tabs open at a time, plus 15 extensions and a UI tweaked to suit your workflow then you know that no other browser comes close to competing with Firefox on any level.
Yes, Chrome has the ability to have extensions created now but the reality is that every feature I want is not available yet, and some may never come. Firefox, meanwhile, has them. The only thing I want from Chrome that Firefox doesn’t have is a tab-process manager that lets me know which tabs are consuming the most CPU or RAM so that I can kill them independently.
I prefer Firefox but when I see such posts I always think it’s a joke, until I realize people are seriously having 100+ tabs open at a time. Like, bookmarks would be faster more organized and use less memory (and even cpu at this point, hi js, plugins etc) but people prefer clicking tabs instead of a button ?
Why would you think that a bookmark replaces a tab?
Bookmarks are highly static and difficult to manage. They appear only when I tell them to and disappear only when I tell them to. Adding them may be a simple keystroke but removing them is not. Reordering tabs is also simple when I want to do that.
Tabs appear in the order in which I browse, which gives me a time-based history of where I was and what I was doing and lets me consume the contents at my leisure. Tabs are more ‘obvious’ in that I can’t forget that they’re open.
When I’m working on something–like doing a little research on an error message, I will open 20-30 tabs during the process and close them only when my problem is solved and each individual tab has nothing I may need to refer to soon.
When I am browsing news, like here or slashdot, I open one tab for each story link I want to follow up on plus one for each story comments I want to check. This can be dozens of tabs per day, which is more than I can usually consume in a day. Thus I create an ever-growing backlog of “things to read” that is ordered linearly.
There are a million reasons why tabs are suitable and few why they are not, whereas bookmarks are simply unsutiable. I don’t care to remember some damned article forever, just until I get to it. I don’t want to forget to delete it and have it sit there polluting my bookmarks DB. I like to keep my bookmarks sorted and tagged, but I don’t want to put any work in to properly sorting the dozens of new tabs I create every day. They are not to be preserved! They exist only temporarily.
What’s more, a bookmark’s title+favicon rarely provide sufficient information. CTRL+TABing through my open tabs list, even when I have 200 tabs, allows me to locate a specific page fairly quickly and definitely lets me get a sense of what each page is for as I look at it. Bookmarks, on the other hand, leave me guessing as to what the page is and what it’s for and why I opened it… unless I carefully annotate each bookmark, which is a lot of time consuming work.
I think my point is this: Back off. You may not do it, but it’s not silly or stupid. There are those of us who really do need to use a crazy number of open tabs.
If you use a lot of tabs, only Opera is able to handle them. Firefox chokes ages before Opera even starts to flinch.
But opera is missing (or was missing) almost all of my extensions. What’s more, where I can figure out how to customize the firefox UI and behavior to be the way I want it I never could make Opera comfortable. It really suffers from configuration-soup, and this is coming from a “More options == better” kind of guy.
Can I get emacs keybindings in opera? Preferably without manually setting each one. how about fasterfox-style page load timing? I presume it has a greasemonkey analog. How about noscript? Save-page-as-image? Save-selection-as-image? Can I put the nav buttons, address bar and menu bar all on one horizontal line? Can I get one-keystroke delicious bookmarking? Does it have firebug or equivalent? Javascript console? Does it have a batch-saver available that doesn’t suck? I need to be able to mass-save files in open tabs (yes, for porn). Is there an intigrated EXIF viewer so I don’t need to launch an external tool? Can I zoom images independently of the whole page?
I could go on and on. I use a lot of extensions.
How about things Firefox doesn’t do. Can I get CPU or RAM usage per-tab? That would be a killer feature.
Agreed. They are all talk and no quantized facts.
Mozilla’s plan is to integrate the two engines sometime in September, and they know they will not be “fast” until that integration work is done, and they have an enumerated list of issues to tackle to get to that point, which is how they are able to predict when the performance improving integration work will complete. That’s pretty quantified – even has a schedule.
Seeing the speed of the progress (20% performance improvement per week?!) if they keep up that peace they’ve a winner
It’s easy to improve performance massively when it sucks in the first place. But then you’ll hit a wall where you don’t have any low hanging fruit or easy optimizations to do anymore.
[He also promises that Firefox 4 will be “one generation ahead” of other browsers in relation to Javascript speed.]
By removing the crap all together? *holding thumbs*
I realize that many web sites force you to use it, but you know, it’s such a pleasure to surf with Javascript turned off. Much faster, no pop-ups, more secure.
“Faster” is a relative term. Is it faster to reload a whole complex page or just part of it as can be done with Javascript. Is it faster to have to type all fields or have some auto-filled based on other fields as you can do with Javascript? There are times when pages will be faster without it, and times when it makes pages faster. As with all things it depends on the application. It’s also much faster to browse the ‘net with images turned off, but again, for many applications thats as impractical as turning off Javascript.
In the 90’s browser was perceived as HTML file viewer with ability to open HTML files located on remote servers.
Today, browser is application platform, no longer just a viewer. One CAN NOT write DECENT web application without Javascript. Not the ones that people would want to use. Only the most simple applications can be built “server side only”.
Also graphics performance seems to be a BIG problem with Mozilla. Just try some of the chrome experiments (that don’t use chrome specific code). Firefox is horrible slow with them. Even the WebKit in Qt outperforms Firefox a lot. Google Chrome is even faster for some reason. Not even the scrollbar waves render fluently on Firefox! I tested the latest nightly and it even is slower than the one I tried before or the Firefox 3.6 I currently use.
Still I hope Firefox to really get faster and I just can’t switch to Chrome/Chromium, because of all the Add-Ons and Firefox tremendous extensibility (XPCOM+XUL!).
I am not saying Linux is crap. But this article simply tells us why the Lnux “desktop” isn’t there yet.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A400 Safari/6531.22.7
Care to explain why? Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but I can’t follow your reasoning.
BTW, I can post user agent strings too:
Mozilla/5.0 (OpenBSD; U; OpenBSD 4.8; en-US) AppleWebKit/531.21 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.4.1 Safari/531.21
This is the one I use to be able to watch HTML5 Youtube in surf without being offered Adobe Crash.
Edited 2010-08-18 23:39 UTC
What are user agent string…
Oh…
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.1 Safari/533.17.8
Actually, to be honest, I didn’t know…
I can post user agent strings too!
Opera/9.80 (Windows Mobile; WCE; Opera Mobi/WMD-50433; U; en) Presto/2.4.13 Version/10.00
I have flash, but it is only activated if I tap on the flash content.
Windows Mobile 6.5 ftw!
OSAlert automatically put the user agent string. I didn’t type it. I was using an iPhone when I typed the comment.
I wasn’t trying to act smart or say that Linux is crap. I was pointing out for the graphical application developer community, the example program being Firefox in this article. Linux environment is not there yet with tools these developers need.
I can’t believe I got modded down for something that is clearly in the article. I guess the person who modded me didn’t read the following words in the article.
From the article,
“Chris Blizzard: Within what’s provided: Yes. We’re trying to give the best experience possible on each platform. So for Windows Vista and 7 we see huge improvements when doing certain graphically intensive stuff. On OS X for example we have support for OpenGL for doing compositing, on Linux we do the same. But generally the Windows APIs that we have are better and more rich than what we have on other platforms. To give you an example: On Linux Cairo and Pixman were supposed to be fast, but unfortunately the underlying infrastructure never really got fast. On OS X we are actually pretty fast but Direct2D gives the performance advantage to Windows at the moment.”
Keywords: Best Experience. Meaning Linux is still not there yet for giving the “best experience”.
If you were to rate the three platforms from 0 to 10 for developing web technologies what would each be?
I probably could have posted something lengthy, but hey I was using a mobile device.
I am sorry.
Well, as an evident Apple user complaining about Linux when the article clearly states that Windows isn’t just faster than Linux, but much faster than OS X as well, you certainly did look more than just slightly trollish.
Yeah, Linux is much slower than Windows for some graphics related tasks. And slightly faster for others. And usually faster than OS X.
erm..no.
Linux is faster and lighter than windows for many tasks but graphics is certainly not it. **Cough** Xrender **Cough**
Xrender isn’t used for everything.
I just want to say that I deeply disagree with this :
If the computer you use to browse the web is not equipped with a serious keyboard, it’s YOUR problem. This is not, by any means, an excuse to make incomplete posts. Just take the time to write them or wait a bit until you’ve got some serious mean of typing at hand before answering comments
It sometimes takes me half an hour to write a post on my E63… but I generally can take it since like most mobile browsing users I use it when bored in public transportations or at work ! ^^
Sorry for the rant. This just sounded exactly like “I use a phone to browse the web so I can use sms spelling in my comments” to me…
Edited 2010-08-19 08:20 UTC
If you really want to compare the same browser on different platforms then let’s not forget that while DirectX is better than what Linux has to offer, Linux’s TCP/IP stack still out-performs Windows’ (albeit it’s become marginal in Win7) and Linux generally runs smoother on “normal” hardware than Win7.
So in the grand scheme of things, they’re still about even.
Edited 2010-08-19 10:11 UTC
It’s great that Firefox decided to participate actively in the Javascript race.
It’s also worth noting that Firefox has much more to gain from improved Javascript speed, since all the extentions and even its UI is using Javascript.
…no matter how much Thom and the others here are fawning over Chrome.
Don’t get me wrong– I’ve used Chrome, both on Windows and as it’s been coming along for Debian, and I still do. I see how much faster Javascript times are and how much it has improved page load times.
But I want my extensions. Chrome has no SearchEngine extension; I use that drop-down menu in Firefox repeatedly for all the sites I use regularly. That alone speeds up a good deal of my surf time. Chrome (understandably, this is Google) does not have a comprehensive AdBlock extension; yes, I am evil and block practically all ads.
In short, I know extensions can bog a browser down, but when they are truly useful to my productivity, I will take the tradeoff, even as things currently stand. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to whatever Javascript improvements Mozilla can muster.
I think mozilla at this point has been pretty aimless. They seem to think they are still in a browser war like Netscape vs Internet Explorer but now the browser isn’t as important today.
Adobe controls which devices can watch the majority of online video now.
Google controls over 80% of global internet traffic.
Facebook is starting trying to control the sharing of online identities.
Both Google and Facebook are gathering sharing private data about their users to advertisers. Google’s ad network has about 65% share of the overall ad serving market.
What can Firefox do to combat those threats to the internet? I mean we’re not talking about browsers here we’re talking about Plugins and Websites.
It can survive and not let Google product take it’s place. It’s a start. Then it can the web easier to manage like with the new page manager net yet part of FF4, but planned.
Even in US, Google do not control 80% of Internet Traffic, It doesn’t control 80% of US’s search market shares.
And it is not the market leader in places like Japan and China.
And also not the market leader in Korea. I doubt if Google could ever get the no. 1 position in that market.
To be honest, I think you’re reacting impulsively and expecting Firefox developers to do the same.
They stood firm on H.264 which might have been one of the deciding factors in Google arranging WebM for HTML5 video. As a result, the future looks better than you claim for online video. (For sites that keep Flash for DRM, the only thing that comes to mind is letting them learn what it means to shun rabid mac-heads. Requiring Flash for DRM is like a lesser version of requiring Silverlight for DRM.)
As mentioned, Google doesn’t even control 80% of global search traffic and, really, Firefox would have to cripple their efforts to compete in their areas of strength to be able to throw any significant amount of effort into in this area they know nothing about.
Facebook IS trying to control online identities, but the Firefox guys are doing what they can to help the competition with experiments like “Account Manager” which chip away at the advantages of centralized ID… especially when paired with stuff like the up-and-coming “OpenID + OAuth + WebFinger” stack. (In this use case, WebFinger hides the counter-intuitive OpenID URL behind an email-style identifier as everyone’s grown used to)
Yes, Google is trying to become an ad monopsony, but again, all Firefox can really do there is to become the best platform for extensions like NoScript and AdBlock.
As for talking about “plugins and websites”, the plugins side of things CAN be helped by better Javascript engines. The Firefox guys have actually demonstrated pure-Javascript DSPs, Darkroom image filtering, and other CPU-bound operations using WebGL statically-typed variables and special builds of Gecko which provide an API for getting raw bytestream data from HTML5 audio tags… as well as experimental JS multi-touch APIs. That makes plugins like Flash and Native Client less necessary.
Take a look at http://hacks.mozilla.org/ if you want to read more.
Edited 2010-08-19 03:32 UTC
These are real issues that are facing the internet today and the foreseeable future. Also, this have more to do with the organization’s management than the developers.
I don’t know what Mozilla should do about Google but Firefox isn’t even remotely addressing the situation. Especially since they’re getting paid to keep them as the default search. (By the way my search statistics come from Net Applications: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qpr…)
I agree that their leverage of Firefox has helped with the video codec issue but not really the runtime (flash player) issue. Even then I believe there’s so much more they could do if they weren’t still focused on the browser wars.
I’m not saying the Firefox team is at fault here this is about the Mozilla Foundation’s effort for making a better internet.
@Elv13
I think your referring to “Account Manager”. While I’m happy mozilla takes the threat seriously enought to do something about it, what about the 77% of internet users that don’t use Firefox? This will only help those users if competing vendors adopt their idea.
When will Mozilla be able to focus on other important non-browser related internet threats? What could they realistically do with Firefox to address these threats? How much of a priority should Firefox be for them at this point?
@iwod
You must have accidentally glossed over the word “global” in my post. In any case it’s well over half of internet searches; the greatest source of internet traffic.
if it’s released in the next ten years…heck, by the time this thing hits it’s final stage, something better will have come along. Firefox 4…yeah, right! (we’re currently at 3.6.8…that’s a TON of versions to have to wait through)
Firefox 4 Beta 3 is available now… It still does not have the promised speed improvements, though.
Certainly, nobody says that improvements are in place. As a Linux all-time user, I have the options of Chrome and FF. I was using Chrome for some time, but there are too many things that are missing from it, which, on the other hand, I have in FF. Probably that’s why the Chrome’s UI is (feels?) faster, but that’s not the most dazzling thing in the world. I prefer FF because it has tons of useful extensions, most sites I visit are quite friendly with it (as opposed to Chrome), it has good integration with the rest of my software, like Thunderbird (what a surprise
), IM client, etc, etc. Last but not least – some of the internal and external web applications or services I have to use quite simply refuse to add support for Chrome – they like IE and FF only. So, in my particular case, I can’t be productive enough with Chrome, not to mention some of the inabilities to customize, and the browsing habits – I can’t change them just because of one browser – I know the location of the functions over here and there, I know the exact place in the menu where certain application lives, I’m used to certain shortcuts – this is what makes me fast. Now, for the speed – this relative term – I must admit that FF has its slowdowns – especially in the search bar and the UI/menu – there are lot of IO calls being made, which Mozilla guys stated to got rid of. Personally I don’t really care or pay attention to JS speed, as pages load up eventually, at acceptable speeds – I can’t really notice this or that site being much faster in Chrome – probably the underlying hardware takes care of that. I don’t hate Chrome, it has some pretty nice stuff, like autocompletion of the URL typed in the omnibar, for example, but I’d still like to keep my old habits = FF. I really hope that by the end of the year we will see a much competitive browser by Mozilla, while at the same time I don’t think that something revolutionary will appear – browsers have reached, IMHO, some sort of features/speed/usability saturation, and I think the innovations will be less that we were used to see.
What I’m looking for in a browser it will allegedly appear exactly in FF4 …
Yeah, we’re going to have to wait through all those versions…wait, what? Seriously, you don’t think that’s how version numbers work, do you?
One generation ahead in terms of an imperceptible difference.
Firefox 1 was a generation ahead.
Everything else has been epeen waving in comparison.
It would be a lot of work, but a full Cocoa port of Firefox wold give Mozilla a lot more API’s to play around than just OpenGL for compositing… Hopefully that gains traction in the future.
Firefox can already use the cpu and if it supports OpenGL it also can use the gpu. What would you gain if you support cocoa?
The same you do on Windows not writing it in plain C/C++ with no use of DirectX API’s.
You get a whole bunch of GPU accelerated routines (with software fallbacks): you get Core Animation, you get Core Text, and you get an easier path towards 64 bit Firefox on Mac. You would also be able to use Apple’s dev tools for a more productive debugging and extra performance (Clang for static analysis and compilation).
I’d also imagine it could have an easier time integrating into the OS X experience making use of they Keychain to store passwords and other sensitive data, it could use the system’s spellchecker, it might open PDF’s in the browser itself without external plugins, etc…
The problem with this approach is that you would have a hard time keeping the Windows and Linux C/C++ ports and the OS X Cocoa version at the same pace… not impossible, but it might be a burden for Mozilla and the OSS devs which might not like Objective-C that much.
Maybe they should hire the Camino guys. I used to use Camino as my main browser back when I used Panther and Tiger. It was pretty good.
More useless chest-thumping by Mozilla. There’s no real data to back up their repeated claims about being ahead of everyone else when Firefox’s new JS engine is done.
Quit it with the lame PR lies, and focus on at least catching up. My guess is that Chrome, Safari and Opera will still beat Firefox at JavaScript when all is said and done. It’s not like everyone else is standing still. They are moving full steam ahead, while Firefox is desperately trying to catch up.
well for one thing, firefox’s JM uses.. guess what.. that’s right, Safari’s nitro JS which is actually the fastest.
On top of it they add TM (heuristics, tracing)
So all things equals (which, granted, are not), Firefox can only be faster, at least from a 100000km point of view.
Now it’s up to the engineers to get all that stuff together “the right way”
Actually, Opera’s JS engine is currently the fastest, followed by Chrome, and finally Safari in 3rd place.
TM won’t help. The other JS engines all do similar things. It’s not like Mozilla reinvented the wheel.
Also, Chrome, Opera and Safari have all made quite significant performance gains lately, only widening the gap to Firefox. It’s silly to think that everyone else will be standing still.
No, they don’t. Tracemonkey is nothing like any of the other JS engines.
It’s a tracing JIT, while all other JavaScript engines (including Jaegermonkey) are simple method-based JITs.
In theory, a tracing JIT can be much faster than a method-based JIT for dynamically typed languages like JavaScript.
In practice, a tracing JIT can’t be used for everything. That’s why it needs to be paired with either an interpreter.
No, it’s not all that different. The other engines are already doing things that TM is supposedly going to be so fast at. So no, it’s not going to be faster. Mozilla is just talking trash. Again.
1. J~A¤gerMonkey only uses Nitro’s assembler. The rest of the compiler stack is build by Mozilla.
2. According to the current synthetic benchmarks V8 is currently slightly faster than Nitro overall.
This is one area where Firefox is seriously lagging behind. I have to use third party ‘hacks’ in Windows and Linux just to get Firefox start at reasonable time (< 5 seconds), which is bemusing to most average users; I mean, they’d certainly just switch to whatever browser that at least gives the illusion of being snappy (e.g. Safari).
I’ve been a huge Firefox fan and power user since version 2.0 and it would be sad to see it increasingly losing usage share from time to time.
C’mon, Mozilla, work that part out.