[Firefox] Jägermonkey: it’s in ur browser | Hacker News Reader

[Firefox] Jägermonkey: it’s in ur browser

blog.mozilla.com

100 pointssetconndevp19 comments

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I've tested

http://nightly.mozilla.org/js-preview.html

with my simple benchmark loop (two floating point additions per pass) and it's really better:

300M passes of loop, time in seconds:

0.88 Firefox 4b6

2.26 Firefox 3.6.6

which is approximately 2.5 times faster.

Now that particular loop executes at the same speed as ActionScript 3 (in Flash 10) with explicit typing. That's the big achievement for Mozilla.

Here's some more data from Mozilla's own testing setup:

http://arewefastyet.com/?machine=5

Where JM+TM stands for "Jagermonkey + Tracemonkey". It looks to be gaining on V8 and Apple Nitro pretty fast, considering the timeline involved.

Gotta love the domain name + favicon :-)

Also like the big "No." mid page.

The team seems to be pretty focused on getting to be faster than Chrome/Safari. Great idea to have a simple goal, and a simple answer to whether they have achieved it or not.

Looking at their v8 bench speedup: from 0.7 ms to around 0.3 ms we get again 2.3, comparable with the simple loop measurement. But interestingly enough, Google's V8 gets its speed in a very different way, as my mentioned benchmark loop performs much worse in Chrome: 3.9 sec on Chrome 6.0.472, thats 4.4 times slower than ActionScript or Firefox Beta 4.

Can't get over how young the programmer team looks. Compared say, to Lars Bak who is 45-ish and working on V8... Whatever happened to the grizzled JIT writers?

They probably work at Apple or Google. Firefox seems to coast on a lot of recent graduates.

Mozilla has really got to find a way to generate more profit. They live off of Google and that support may not always be there.

Seriously, why does everyone always ignore that Opera has a faster JS engine than Chrome? Google aren't the ones to beat!

Can you provide any evidence to support this?

The only metric I've ever seen Opera beat Chrome on was IE9's flying images benchmark.

It's ahead in the Peacekeeper benchmark, but falls just short on the Sunspider and JS tests.

http://www.geek.com/articles/news/opera-10-6-tops-performanc...

Gah, I was about to say that Opera beats Chrome at Sunspider on my machine, but then realized I was still running Chrome 5. Just upgraded. Here are the Sunspider numbers on my machine:

Chrome 5: 315

Opera 10.60: 287.2

Chrome 6: 279.2

Point taken.

The Peacekeeper benchmark has some glaring flaws in the benchmark code:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020664.html

(For example, "The benchmark starts with an array of 100,000 elements and removes 20 elements for each call. After 5000 calls, the calls become no-ops, and the benchmark then times those no-ops.")

I do a lot of experiments around the edge of browser performance (and also regularly check other folks' demos in multiple browsers).

Benchmarks are not completely representative to "real world" performance. There are always some areas which work very well in particular browsers and areas in which some browsers are absolutely terrible.

You can get practically arbitrary order of browser performance by mixing "do-good" and "do-bad" tasks.

Subjectively, since recently Opera often feels faster than Chrome [1].

Not always, it's maybe 50/50 split, sometimes Chrome is faster, but in overall subjective experience Opera feels better (by a tiny bit).

I suspect it's because Chrome excels mainly at "behind-the-scene" more numerical type of tasks, while Opera is faster at more tangible "in-your-face" things like DOM manipulation / rendering / canvas.

Also, again subjectively, Opera's performance feels better "balanced". Chrome is crazy fast in some areas (see V8 benchmark), but slow/average in others. Opera is fast almost everywhere, so it has less bottlenecks.

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[1] More objectively, from my stuff which has numerically comparable performance:

http://alteredqualia.com/canvasmol/#DNA_crystal

On my notebook, this makes:

- 29 FPS in Chrome 7.0.517.0 dev

- 42 FPS in Opera 10.62 (45% faster)

Though for some simpler molecules, Chrome is sometimes much faster. Go figure.

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Another test:

http://alteredqualia.com/attractor/#TPsP2jWzkUx22cuNN5XToJNV...

- 525 ms Chrome

- 483 ms Opera (9% faster)

[1 math unit, 1 rendering unit]

-----

Case for "Chrome-has-faster-math", above example with "high detail" (which does more calculations compared to rendering):

- 1611 ms Chrome

- 2152 ms Opera (34% slower)

[10 math units, 1 rendering unit]

-----

Above with "wallpaper" settings (much more math, but also significant rendering):

- 4304 ms Chrome

- 5116 ms Opera (19% slower)

[20 math units, 4 rendering units]

It can be explained by the fact that Opera isn't the main rivals of Firefox in the browser market.

Edit: http://arewefastyet.com/faq.html

  The team's explanation: Right now, the performance tests
  are run on a Mac, which means no IE. Also the tests rely on
  a "shell" JS engine that runs in a command line. It doesn't
  test browsers. We'll change that, eventually.

Those new versions aren't compatible with any of my installed plugins. (If I can't get Tree Style Tab I'm just going to use Chrome.)

You have to update your extension's manifest every time a new version of Firefox is out. It is possible that your extension's maintainers haven't included Firefox 4 in their list of whitelisted versions even though it may work. Provided you are sufficiently technical and wouldn't mind dealing with crashes, install Nightly Tester Tools (now renamed to something more officially iirc, but searching for Nightly Tester Tools should get you there) and try to disable the compatibility check and see if it works. Back up your profile first so you can just copy it over again if something breaks horrifically.

OK, thanks, I might try that.

My app runs 20% faster now. Thank you, Mozilla!

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