Javascript will run twice as fast, with Firefox 3.1 and TraceMonkey

[httpwebwitch]

"TraceMonkey is a project to bring native code speed to JavaScript," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's interim vice president of engineering, adding that JavaScript performance nearly doubles compared to Firefox 3.0, based on the SunSpider test of JavaScript performance. That speeds up many basic tasks, but it also brings image editing and 3D graphics into JavaScript's abilities, he said.

source [news.cnet.com]

The partial-compiling technology is fascinating, and early tests look very promising. Native browser Javascript is about to become as powerful and fast as the plugins - and the web of extremely rich interactivity heralded by Flash in the early 2000's is on its way back in. Can you smell it? Yes that's the unmistakable upwind aroma of animated splash pages.

Tip:
If you haven't started playing with <canvas>, now is the time to get acquainted.

[coopster]

Although this in and of itself is good news, did you note the additional changes arriving? Includes ogg audio and video support. It is available today as a plug-in, but seems it is going native.

[maximillianos]

Has anyone else had ridiculous problems with Firefox 3? I downloaded the latest about a month ago and had nothing but problems. I'd say about 50% of the sites I visited would eventually crash the browser.

I had to uninstall and go back to 2.0. No problems now.

Is Firefox 3 stable yet?

[Philosopher]

I've heard that from a couple of people, but personally, I haven't had a single problem with FF3.

To the OP, that sounds quite interesting and definitely opens the door to some nice possibilities!

[UserFriendly]

God, I hate Javascript.

And, yeah, I've also had a lot of gyp from Firefox 3, but I'm running a 64-bit Linux box, and I think most of the trouble is caused by swfdec.

[incrediBILL]

This is great news!

Now those Invisible Iframe launcher scripts will run much faster than before in attempting to infect your machine!

[httpwebwitch]

iBILL you are such a reliable doomsayer - bless your eternally pessimistic heart <3

I have no issues with FF3 to report, though some recent releases of Firebug have been troublesome.

TraceMonkey isn't claiming to fix any problems with JavaScript itself - that's what the "Harmony" project is about. TraceMonkey will make all those problems happen faster! Huzzah!

[amznVibe]

Faster firefox means faster gmail and other apps that are getting overwhelmed by jquery and prototype use but it's interesting that while even FF3's javascript is faster, it's renderer is slower than IE and Opera.

Try collapsing a long table with many rows, row by row without delay and time it in Firefox vs IE vs Opera. Firefox simply cannot handle the dhtml update and takes twice as long.

So virtual calculation = much faster. Screen updates = still slow.

[venti]

Now if IE could be just a 10th as fast as FF is currently..

[coopster]

Now those Invisible Iframe launcher scripts ...

I never browse without the NoScript extension active.

and the web of extremely rich interactivity heralded by Flash in the early 2000's is on its way back in. Can you smell it? Yes that's the unmistakable upwind aroma of animated splash pages.

The tongue-in-cheek humor here made me LOL, but on the serious side of this is the first part of your sentence -- the recognition of the extremely rich interactivity. There is another thread in the Supporter's Forum right now discussing the Mozilla Ubiquity project that is worth checking out as it is directly targeted at the end user's experience regarding interactivity.

And I was checking out the Pencil [webmasterworld.com] Project yesterday too. Pencil makes uses of the SVG support in Firefox 3 to implement all the shape rendering and scripting.

It's almost as if Firefox is going to be your all-in-one software package soon. How will they contain "browser-bloat"?

[tripleox]

This will please the uber ajax coders in the office! Is this the start of Web 3.0?

[httpwebwitch]

Maybe 2.01

Web 3.0 will involve artificially intelligent user-agents and nanobrowsers

[koan]

Web 3.0 will involve artificially intelligent user-agents and nanobrowsers

That's when John Connor comes into play.