With the browsers wars forcing vendors to begin milking as much power as possible from their product, we – as consumers – get to take advantage of the new optimizations. Of course, we also notice when vendor’s begin to lag behind.
As it currently stands, Chrome is blazingly fast browser thanks largely in part to its JavaScript engine. And Firefox’s lack of optimizations become increasingly apparent for power users. But last week, Mozilla vowed to continue pushing their browser forward with comparable optimizations…
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 enhance” Firefox’s JavaScript engine in ways that match Google’s work, and he indicated that this will begin after the release of Firefox 4, due early next year.
The article also takes a look at Google’s upcoming JavaScript engine (currently referred to as Crankshaft):
Crankshaft consists of four components. There’s a base compiler as well as a run-time profiler that identifies hot code – code that’s frequently used. Then an optimizing compiler recompiles the hot code to offer such optimizations as loop-invariant code motion, linear-scan register allocation, and inlining. Plus, Google’s V8 team has included “deoptimization support”, which identifies cases where the optimizing compiler has over-promised on speed improvements. In this case, the engine falls back on the base compiler.
Read the full story.
Love the innovation that competition sparks. For all development-related work, Firefox is my weapon of choice, but if I’m doing any browsers or drafting, then Chrome is where I work.
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