Sign in / up

back to article Mozilla vows Google 'Crankshaft' riposte

Mozilla has vowed not to get "left behind" by Google's latest JavaScript engine, codenamed Crankshaft. With a blog post on Wednesday, Mozilla's David Mandelin mused on Craftshaft's "adaptive compilation" design and said that the Mozilla JavaScript team and developer community "definitely have the skills and resources to …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. FuzzyTheBear
    Pint

    Left wondering ..

    I'm left wondering after Apache's departure , how much of Java will be left in the not too short term, say 5 years.Seems like investing massive amounts of time in java is a big risk.

    Dunno what you think , but something smells gamey around Java to the casual observer and for them to massively put resources in improving their java engine , a bit of a gamble.

    Anyways .. with what goes on at the moment in Java land is this really a good investment in time and resources ?

    Guess ill have a cold one and stop worrying.

    1 5
    1. Lyle Dietz
      Reply Icon

      Don't wonder..

      While Java is probably on its deathbed, JavaScript won't be affected. They are completely separate languages after all.

      3 0
    2. Jordan Davenport
      Reply Icon
      WTF?

      JavaScript is in no way related to Java

      Oracle's blunders don't affect ECMAScript or JavaScript. Java is compiled bytecode that runs in a virtual machine across multiple operating systems. JavaScript is scripting that is compiled on-demand in a web browser for completely different purposes.

      2 0
    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Alert

      I'm left wondering too...

      ...but mainly about the replies you're going to get.

      2 0
    4. Adam Starkey
      Reply Icon

      Java != JavaScript

      You're confusing two different languages. Java and JavaScript (formally ECMA 262) are not the same thing. JavaScript, which is the topic of the article, is a scripting language invented by Netscape. The similarity of the names have nothing whatsoever to do with Netscape trying to ride on the buzz surrounding someone else's product.

      2 0
  2. David Simpson 1
    Megaphone

    Woulda

    Woulda coulda shoulda Mozilla, I used to love Firefox but Chrome wipes it in the dirt performance wise.

    Firefox 4 looks good but Google's release cycle is five or six times faster than Mozilla's and I don't see how they have a chance of keeping up long term.

    1 1
  3. David Hicks
    Badgers

    I still think too much goes on in the browser

    Yes, you can do some neat stuff now, but on the other hand javascript leads to massive amounts of bloat, pages that load horrifically slowly as scripts and content are pulled from a huge number of different servers, not to mention new and innovative ways to track people.

    I don't use noscript (yet) but javascript loaded in from third party sites is not allowed in my browser.

    I miss the days when the web was a dcocument display tech...

    4 2
    1. Tom 15
      Reply Icon

      But...

      But, that's just poor design, you've always been able to develop things that are unusable... a good developer should use jQuery and a little bit of their own JS and keep the files, etc, that are imported to under 100kb.

      0 1
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Stop

      The good ol days

      are never as good as we remember them. Back when a web page was just text and a couple of images the pages probably took longer or, likely, an insignificantly different amount of time to load. Browsers, site design and connection speeds all develop at roughly the same rate. because they have to. Any sudden change in page content has to be matched by the abilty to deliver the content in a reasonable time and with a browser capable of displaying it (chicken/egg situation).

      Anyway, the good old days involved dropped connections, multiple redials, AOL... AOLers, rediculous telephone fees and weak, insecure and ineffective software. When design options were limited designers reverted to blinking text and multiple fonts/font colours in a document and finally all that text would load half an hour before the image would.

      Nah, I dont miss those days. I am constantly excited for the next big change and where the developments will lead us. Sure some of it will be bloated, slow and ineffectual but out of the mud comes diamonds.

      1 0
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    I'm left wondering...

    ...if anyone actually cares if the page loads 0.01ms faster in one browser than another.

    Gentlemen grab your willlies......

    ready....

    set.....

    start waving!

    2 0
    1. ThomH
      Reply Icon

      Not just that

      Mozilla aren't promising improvements, they're promising to match Chrome.

      "We're hoping to be as good as the competition in the future, in the areas we're willing to talk about" isn't much of a sales pitch.

      0 0
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Go

      Re: anyone cares if the page loads 0.01ms faster

      Nope, no-one cares about 0.01ms on page load. But some of the cutting-edge things require a lot of processing in the client. Think of how Google docs is an alternative to the traditional MS Office, and now imagine a web-based image editing program, where all the image filters and effects are processed in JavaScript. That simply can't be done with an old slow Javascript engine, you need something much faster.

      Or think of a browser-based game written entirely in Javascript, using the proposed JavaScript 3D APIs (WebGL).

      0 0
  5. xj25vm

    More headline grabbing stuff

    Or maybe one day Mozilla will fire all those marketing power hungry types - and hire few more engineers, who will concentrate on squashing those bugs and delivering a solid, useful and functional piece of software. In the true spirit of FOSS software and community. And stop dicking about and squandering millions of dollars on stunts designed to keep up with the similar headline grabbing stunts from large commercial companies.

    Where is the performance improvements in the Lightning calendar? Where is an open standards calendar server? Where is a usable and scalable contacts server? Where is the work needed to bring Thunderbird forward to the same version level as Firefox?

    Yeah, I know, not enough man power. But 0.0001 seconds shaved off the Javascript engine certainly seems to deserve the extra man-power.

    1 1
    1. Bucky 2
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      No competition

      We look to Thunderbird because there really aren't very many options for cross-platform open source Email client/server solutions.

      The big stopper for any office I've worked in is the lack of shared contacts, the seemingly obvious solution being read/write LDAP.

      The Mozilla people started down that road 10 years ago (possibly more, but I've found stuff from 2000) and abandoned the effort. Apparently, they can't hold their nose and borrow the working open-source implementation from Evolution, preferring instead to complain that it's "too hard" and offer nothing at all, after--let's see--10 years, times 260 work days a year, times 8 hours--20,000 hours of constant effort.

      0 0
    2. M Gale
      Reply Icon

      0.0001 seconds.

      Multiplied by a loop that has to execute 5,000 times 50 times per second? Yes I'd call that significant.

      If you're after a plug-in free web page with flashy graphics and effects, Javascript with some kind of middleware or abstraction library like JQuery is about your only option. A faster browser means faster plugin-free transitions, slideshows, scrolling, sprites and whatever else you want to punish these optimising compilers with.

      0 0
  6. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    I'm left wondering...

    what planet Mozilla are on. As the latest Firefox4 builds are only half the speed of Chrome and Opera...

    I'm guessing they can talk the talk and thats enough for Firefox fanboys.

    1 2
This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like