The Browser Arms Race
These are exciting times for the web. The second half of 2008 has been really great for browsers in general and javascripts engines in particular. There have been a lot of excitement with the release of Mozilla Firefox 3.0 and Google Chrome. IE 8 is in beta and Opera is making their releases regularly with browsers trying to beat each other in speed for being standards-compliant using tests such as ACID3.
Also the web is slowly but surely moving from webpages and portal towards desktop-like apps with more and more applications being built using javascript and DHTML. Better and faster connectivity is making web applications accessible to all. The weak link so far were the buggy and slow javascript interpreters.
Various Javascript engines embedded in browsers are becoming faster and faster and it has led to an arms race. A short chronology of events follows:
1. Safari has really taken off after support from Apple with a great number of improvements over the past year. Safari was the first to fire a salvo with annoucement of a new Javascript engine called Squirrelfish. Squirrelfish was faster than SpiderMonkey – the default javascript engine embedded in FF 2.x and FF 3.0. Squirrelfish was faster than Tamarin. (Tamarin is a high-performance implementation of JS 2).
2. Not the one to be left behind, Firefox came up with a update to SpiderMonkey called TraceMonkey which makes use of “trace trees” to optimise and speedup Javascript code. the result was even faster Javascript execution.
3. In the midst of all this arms race, Google Chrome unleashed the V8 engine (named after the V8 engines from F1 cars), adding another dimension to this race. V8 was supposed to be faster than every other Javascript engine out there. One of the problems with V8 was that it cannot ported very easily to other platforms.
4. Mozilla then published benchmarks to disprove the claim. Brendan Eich blog post showed that Tracemonkey was faster than V8. Don’t expect the battle to stop here though. Andreas Gals nice post on Tracemonkey explains why it is faster.
5. Recently Squirrelfish-extreme was released which again raised the bar on Javascript engine performance.
What was most surprising was that many of the javascript engines were not written with optimisation in mind. They do not make use of the compiler optimisations which are fairly standard in compilers. It’s nice to see that it happening now.
Hi all,
I am working for a software integrator company. My projects includes working on Java and Ruby on Rails and Ajax. I think Web Services is really cool. We also recently have to now work on REST and they are talking about mashups and Struts. Can anyone tell me if there are some good training or conferences so that me and my team members can get to speed with these technologies. Learning from books is not my cup of tea, even not when I was doing engineering
All the help that group members can provide in this regard is much appreciated.
Thanks,
Vaibhavi
Hi Vaibhavi,
There are several online resources available that you just google for. If any of your team like to read then quality books from wiley and oreilly cover such technologies in detail.
I also highly recommend you could attend the upcoming Great Indian Developer Summit ( developersummit dot com) that is covering Java, Agile, REST, JAX-RS, mashups, .NET, Rich Web, JPA, SOA, rich user experiences, Spring, Groovy and more. They have most of the creators of these technologies as speakers. My team is attending this summit 22-25 apr at IISc campus where we are attending the web conference on April 23 and java on April 24. We have been able to get very good discounts. Maybe all those who are interested from your group can sign up together and get a good bargain from them. what say? I also attended last year’s conference and had a really cool time.
In Hyderabad there is Sun Tech Days with some sun speakers.
Thanks,
Anaz