Mozilla’s Firefox 4 to outrun Safari and Chrome

18th July, 2010 by adina
Tags: Apple, Browsers, Chrome, Firefox 4, Gppgle, JavaScript, Mozilla, Safari

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Mozilla, the producer of the Firefox engine, is coming with its new JavaScript engine for the flagship product. Nicknamed JaegerMonkey, it proved to be faster than the current TraceMonkey in an important benchmark test. Firefox 4.0 will include the new engine and is planned to launch for the 1st of September. Mozilla also hopes to outpace other competing browsers thanks to its new code.

JaegerMonkey, in its current form, although unfinished, is still behind the Webkit browsers belonging to Safari and Chrome, when it comes to performance. The code of the engine has been written from scratch. The company claims to generate good machine code, but there are still a few weaknesses to be considered and worked out, among them function calls, which prove to be about ten times slower than what the competition has.

JavaScript is already an important part of tests for web speed. Many applications and complex sites use this scripting language. Safari has been one of the first to use JavaScript as an important feature. Chrome has had a quick growth in market share thanks to rapid improvements in its speed. The gap has been closed recently with the release of Safari 5. Both browsers have consistently surpassed Firefox during the recent months.

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