5 ms·

The next Firefox Nightly build should get 84% on that page, much closer to Edge than Firefox 44 (74%). I work on SpiderMonkey and I'm super excited about this

by jandem 11y ago

The next Firefox Nightly build should get 84% on that page, much closer to Edge than Firefox 44 (74%). I work on SpiderMonkey and I'm super excited about this news. All JS engines have added more-or-less similar performance optimizations but often implemented differently and I'm really interested to see what the Chakra team did. I'd be happy to write a blog post on it next month, if people are interested.

Scarbutt 11y ago
One would think Firefox would lead here, since the browser is Mozilla's primary product, imagine how much hype and PR Firefox would get if only they were far ahead on ES6.
- judofyr 11y ago
  The browser is the primary product to the Chrome team. Does it make any difference?
  - Scarbutt 11y ago
    Although important for their future, Chrome is not Google's cash cow, Chrome is everyday stealing Firefox's market share, they have the luxury to wait, Chrome's pressure (and now Edge) on Firefox hasn't made Firefox step up their game as one would expect.
    - saurik 11y ago
      It might make one question the underlying assumption that competition somehow can cause people to somehow magically become better (a concept many people have which makes no sense). In reality, competition changes how people allocate resources as they play a strategy game to not lose control over segments of the market they perceive as strategically important. It also causes them to lose their negotiation power in the ecosystem, which can be good (as they can't push around smaller players) but also bad (as they can now be pushed around by larger players or loud users). Mozilla used to be able to sit around and say "we absolutely refuse to do certain things, and we want to spend our time figuring out how to make the web an interesting place for power users and developers". I respected that Mozilla. It had a lot of clout in the market and used that clout to fight against DRM on behalf of all users while spending their resources building a super-extensible platform (which I think is a better description of Firefox's crazy plug-in oriented nature). The post-Chrome reality is that Firefox no longer has an automatic dominating position in the "alternative" (non-IE) browser space, and so they have had to start caving to loud user demand and start fighting for the end-user market segment. They don't have the ability to fight against DRM anymore, so they have been forced to include Adobe DRM by default. They don't have the ability to waste a lot of time on power users anymore, so they are dropping all the complex-to-maintain parts of their platform spec and have started dumbing down the UI. The one thing that Chrome did that was truly important was not to compete against Firefox: it was to prove to the world that something--specifically high-performance JavaScript--was both possible and desirable. This is the one positive aspect of "competition", and it is something that frankly should never need to happen in the world of open source, as one can do that in the context of the other project: I can't imagine a scenario where Firefox would have turned down performance patches :/. But of course, Google isn't going to want to do that, because Google is a company with a strategic vision that happens to benefit from owning the web browser and being able to unilaterally make major decisions and perform weird experiments and crazy product integrations through it, which is all the easier for them to bootstrap as they can use their position as "the place almost all people both search and advertise" to push Chrome on people. This means that Chrome has no reason to collaborate with anyone, and even the one alliance they sort of had (with Apple on WebKit) they broke off when they decided they didn't have enough unilateral control: rather than collaborate as part of a community, Google just wants to own the product. They also happen to be the primary customer of Firefox, so Mozilla is being forced to operate on smaller budgets. Note that this is the usual effect of competition and should be the obvious one: the idea of someone "stepping up their game" makes no sense when you are now operating on smaller margins (as competition means you can't demand as much share of the profit on any particular transaction) of a smaller market (as competition means that some customers will be using your competition). You only get to "step up your game" momentarily, often towards frustrating ends (such as giving up the DRM battle or trying to dumb down your UI as fast as possible), until your resources start to wither. (Yes: in a small initial market, competition can cause greater customer awareness leading to more pie for everyone; but that obviously isn't the case here: that is only true near the beginning of a new concept, when no one even believes the thing you are doing is relevant or valuable.) In this case, it is even worse, as the primary customer to Mozilla's product was Google... and so they are essentially screwed in that negotiation. Firefox has had to switch to Yahoo as the default search engine and start making content deals to bundle marketing and software with their product, something they were morally opposed to doing in the past but have been forced into doing due to competition. This also doesn't come cheap with respect to executive time: rather than working out their product and platform vision, they are having to spend time negotiating and having painful conversations about how to keep their company from being destroyed and what morals they are willing to compromise for how long in order to maintain that fight. I don't particularly love Mozilla (as someone who has been paying attention to the open Internet since the beginning, I frankly found Netscape's business model of selling web browsers bundled with ISP contracts terrifying), but I have great sympathy for them these last few years, and absolutely do not see Chrome as being a positive force for anything at all in this ecosystem, except maybe security :/.
      - bzbarsky 11y ago
        Just for historical accuracy, both Safari and Firefox were working on JITs since before Chrome was announced, so high-performance JavaScript was coming independently of Chrome. I do agree that there was more competition with Chrome there and it took less time than it might have otherwise to get to the performance levels we have today.
      - dlandis 11y ago
        So what is next for Mozilla? Sounds like they don't have much going in their favor at the moment.
        lmm 11y ago
        The Mozilla project was wrongheaded from the start. Anyone who genuinely believed in open source could have known that KHTML was better quality code and so it proved, despite vastly greater resources being poured into the terrible Netscape codebase. (I can't help thinking this was largely jingoistic Americans preferring an American project). Some good things have come out of Mozilla-the-organisation - I very much hope that Rust/Servo is a success. But when it actually comes to developing an open-source browser, the incentives of a donation-funded foundation like Mozilla are all wrong. I don't know what the right way to fund open-source development is. Dual licensing has its share of failures. So does trying to make it a direct business. So do research grants. Partly it's just the tragedy of the commons. In my darkest days I wonder if open source is fundamentally doomed because it simply can't make the monetary incentives line up with good engineering practice.
        yuhong 11y ago
        It was already being rewritten as Gecko, which also reminds me of the Mariner fiasco which is part of why Netscape 4 stuck for so long.
        i336_ 11y ago
        What do you mean by / what are you referring to with "it was already being rewritten as Gecko"? And what was the Mariner fiasco?
  - coldtea 11y ago
    It's obviously the primary product to ANY browser development team. The question is if its also the primary product of the COMPANY the development team belongs.
    - saurik 11y ago
      What is actually relevant here is whether the percentage that Google considers Chrome to be valuable to their company times the resources of the company is competitive against the resources Mozilla has (times the percentage that Mozilla considers the browser their focus, as they clearly spend a lot of money on side projects people sometimes seem to enjoy, such as Persona). Mozilla is small enough (at least in comparison to Google) that I think comparing their entire company to one division at Google is probably the correct strategy.
      - st3fan 11y ago
        And not all of us at Mozilla actually work on Firefox. I don't know the number but we work on a lot of different things.
        coldtea 11y ago
        Maybe keep more focus on Firefox then? As it has been losing ground for a decade or so, and without it there is no Mozilla. I see some crazy initiatives obviously doomed to fail (like the mobile OS), which are worrying. Coming up with a Servo based browser that's both more secure due to Rust AND faster due to parallel processing, and a better native-look-and-feel story (at least on the Mac) would be good to catch up with the others. And better developer tools, as Chrome has eaten that influential segment (web devs) up.
        JupiterMoon 11y ago
        I think that firefox has improved their dev tools significantly no? I thought that Chrome and Firefox were neck and neck on this at the moment? With some features better in one and some features better in the other.
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  Strange thing to think. Companies do not produce browsers - employees do. In fact, not even employees. A handful of talented programmers produce browsers. All the desire in the world from a company won't improve the ability of those handful of programmers. It's actually fairly interesting. These huge mega companies are just support teams for a few programmers. All the corporate vision and endless strategies mean nothing compared to one of those programmers having a good or bad day in their work. You honestly get the feeling something somewhere is very broken when you think about it.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >Strange thing to think. Companies do not produce browsers - employees do. In fact, not even employees. A handful of talented programmers produce browsers. All the desire in the world from a company won't improve the ability of those handful of programmers. Strange thing to think. As if the core mission of the company, the motivations of the management, strategic decisions to hire people and structure projects etc, the funding and priority they give to specific products etc, don't determine and affect the end product! Put that way it's as if a great browser engine can even get out of some accounting software house, if only the right programmers chance to work there.
- rockdoe 11y ago
  Microsoft has about 120 times the number of employees that Mozilla has. That's an insane number. If they consider the browser remotely important, they can put much more resources behind it than Mozilla ever can. Only things like the Mythical Man Month save Mozilla a bit here.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - i336_ 11y ago
      ...that is impressive. Now I know that, I'm actually looking forward to playing with the engine more than before - a concentrated braintrust of a few skilled engineers is always more ideal than a sprawling mass of seagulls (to borrow ideology from Finding Nemo :P). The flip side, of course, is that all of you have to keep your game up to quite a high degree or you're out. Respect. (I think what the Edge team as a whole has managed is really amazing - I mean, a brand new browser...) [Also... I have to ask... I've been wondering since before this announcement: is it an even remotely vague possibility that I'll ever able to natively run EdgeHTML on FreeBSD or Linux one day in the distant future, source or binary? :D]
    - mSparks 11y ago
      I have to apologise. but it shows. I simply can't take this claim it has better coverage at face value. because I only just finished testing a week or so ago and the js code we deploy that works on every platform from android through Linux mac ios and Windows. is still mostly broken on edge and doesn't even begin to work in ie. so we will still be recommending users not to use edge or ie at this time. that recommendation isn't one I make happily. but windows machines make up such an insignificant part of the market now it's an easy business decision.
inglor 11y ago
People are definitely interested. Posts about engine architecture are rare and interesting.
teh 11y ago
Super interested! I often find technical blog posts like this years later and I'm really grateful to the people who donate their time to the difficult task of writing them.
eiopa 11y ago
Super interested!
crudbug 11y ago
+1
HalcyonicStorm 11y ago
yes please
fenomas 11y ago
Speaking as someone tuning a JS game, I focus on V8 over other engines because there are great articles around that explain in detail what v8 knows how to optimize, what causes functions to deopt, what kicks object property lookups into slow mode, etc. Articles explaining this for SpiderMonkey would be greatly appreciated!
- joe_developer 11y ago
  Could you recommend a few articles?
  - fenomas 11y ago
    On v8 right? This one is probably the best broad overview: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/v8/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/v8/ To get into the gory details google Vyacheslav Egorov - he's a v8 engineer with a number of talks on YouTube, presentation slides, and blog posts on v8 internals. He also maintains a tool called IRhydra, that lets you examine functions after they've been compiled into v8's internal representation.
    - mraleph 11y ago
      I am glad you find my stuff useful enough to recommend it to other people! Thanks. I just wanted to point out a minor detail: I am an ex-V8 engineer - I have not been working on V8 since 2012.
      - fenomas 11y ago
        Duly noted, and thanks ;)
- VerGreeneyes 11y ago
  FWIW, people in Mozilla are working on a "JIT coach", which will tell you if performance critical sections of your code aren't getting JITed, and why. I believe this is almost ready for use, though I'm not sure when it will be presented.

by jandem 11y ago

Scarbutt 11y ago

One would think Firefox would lead here, since the browser is Mozilla's primary product, imagine how much hype and PR Firefox would get if only they were far ahead on ES6.

judofyr 11y ago
The browser is the primary product to the Chrome team. Does it make any difference?
- Scarbutt 11y ago
  Although important for their future, Chrome is not Google's cash cow, Chrome is everyday stealing Firefox's market share, they have the luxury to wait, Chrome's pressure (and now Edge) on Firefox hasn't made Firefox step up their game as one would expect.
  - saurik 11y ago
    It might make one question the underlying assumption that competition somehow can cause people to somehow magically become better (a concept many people have which makes no sense). In reality, competition changes how people allocate resources as they play a strategy game to not lose control over segments of the market they perceive as strategically important. It also causes them to lose their negotiation power in the ecosystem, which can be good (as they can't push around smaller players) but also bad (as they can now be pushed around by larger players or loud users). Mozilla used to be able to sit around and say "we absolutely refuse to do certain things, and we want to spend our time figuring out how to make the web an interesting place for power users and developers". I respected that Mozilla. It had a lot of clout in the market and used that clout to fight against DRM on behalf of all users while spending their resources building a super-extensible platform (which I think is a better description of Firefox's crazy plug-in oriented nature). The post-Chrome reality is that Firefox no longer has an automatic dominating position in the "alternative" (non-IE) browser space, and so they have had to start caving to loud user demand and start fighting for the end-user market segment. They don't have the ability to fight against DRM anymore, so they have been forced to include Adobe DRM by default. They don't have the ability to waste a lot of time on power users anymore, so they are dropping all the complex-to-maintain parts of their platform spec and have started dumbing down the UI. The one thing that Chrome did that was truly important was not to compete against Firefox: it was to prove to the world that something--specifically high-performance JavaScript--was both possible and desirable. This is the one positive aspect of "competition", and it is something that frankly should never need to happen in the world of open source, as one can do that in the context of the other project: I can't imagine a scenario where Firefox would have turned down performance patches :/. But of course, Google isn't going to want to do that, because Google is a company with a strategic vision that happens to benefit from owning the web browser and being able to unilaterally make major decisions and perform weird experiments and crazy product integrations through it, which is all the easier for them to bootstrap as they can use their position as "the place almost all people both search and advertise" to push Chrome on people. This means that Chrome has no reason to collaborate with anyone, and even the one alliance they sort of had (with Apple on WebKit) they broke off when they decided they didn't have enough unilateral control: rather than collaborate as part of a community, Google just wants to own the product. They also happen to be the primary customer of Firefox, so Mozilla is being forced to operate on smaller budgets. Note that this is the usual effect of competition and should be the obvious one: the idea of someone "stepping up their game" makes no sense when you are now operating on smaller margins (as competition means you can't demand as much share of the profit on any particular transaction) of a smaller market (as competition means that some customers will be using your competition). You only get to "step up your game" momentarily, often towards frustrating ends (such as giving up the DRM battle or trying to dumb down your UI as fast as possible), until your resources start to wither. (Yes: in a small initial market, competition can cause greater customer awareness leading to more pie for everyone; but that obviously isn't the case here: that is only true near the beginning of a new concept, when no one even believes the thing you are doing is relevant or valuable.) In this case, it is even worse, as the primary customer to Mozilla's product was Google... and so they are essentially screwed in that negotiation. Firefox has had to switch to Yahoo as the default search engine and start making content deals to bundle marketing and software with their product, something they were morally opposed to doing in the past but have been forced into doing due to competition. This also doesn't come cheap with respect to executive time: rather than working out their product and platform vision, they are having to spend time negotiating and having painful conversations about how to keep their company from being destroyed and what morals they are willing to compromise for how long in order to maintain that fight. I don't particularly love Mozilla (as someone who has been paying attention to the open Internet since the beginning, I frankly found Netscape's business model of selling web browsers bundled with ISP contracts terrifying), but I have great sympathy for them these last few years, and absolutely do not see Chrome as being a positive force for anything at all in this ecosystem, except maybe security :/.
    - bzbarsky 11y ago
      Just for historical accuracy, both Safari and Firefox were working on JITs since before Chrome was announced, so high-performance JavaScript was coming independently of Chrome. I do agree that there was more competition with Chrome there and it took less time than it might have otherwise to get to the performance levels we have today.
    - dlandis 11y ago
      So what is next for Mozilla? Sounds like they don't have much going in their favor at the moment.
      - lmm 11y ago
        The Mozilla project was wrongheaded from the start. Anyone who genuinely believed in open source could have known that KHTML was better quality code and so it proved, despite vastly greater resources being poured into the terrible Netscape codebase. (I can't help thinking this was largely jingoistic Americans preferring an American project). Some good things have come out of Mozilla-the-organisation - I very much hope that Rust/Servo is a success. But when it actually comes to developing an open-source browser, the incentives of a donation-funded foundation like Mozilla are all wrong. I don't know what the right way to fund open-source development is. Dual licensing has its share of failures. So does trying to make it a direct business. So do research grants. Partly it's just the tragedy of the commons. In my darkest days I wonder if open source is fundamentally doomed because it simply can't make the monetary incentives line up with good engineering practice.
        yuhong 11y ago
        It was already being rewritten as Gecko, which also reminds me of the Mariner fiasco which is part of why Netscape 4 stuck for so long.
        i336_ 11y ago
        What do you mean by / what are you referring to with "it was already being rewritten as Gecko"? And what was the Mariner fiasco?
- coldtea 11y ago
  It's obviously the primary product to ANY browser development team. The question is if its also the primary product of the COMPANY the development team belongs.
  - saurik 11y ago
    What is actually relevant here is whether the percentage that Google considers Chrome to be valuable to their company times the resources of the company is competitive against the resources Mozilla has (times the percentage that Mozilla considers the browser their focus, as they clearly spend a lot of money on side projects people sometimes seem to enjoy, such as Persona). Mozilla is small enough (at least in comparison to Google) that I think comparing their entire company to one division at Google is probably the correct strategy.
    - st3fan 11y ago
      And not all of us at Mozilla actually work on Firefox. I don't know the number but we work on a lot of different things.
      - coldtea 11y ago
        Maybe keep more focus on Firefox then? As it has been losing ground for a decade or so, and without it there is no Mozilla. I see some crazy initiatives obviously doomed to fail (like the mobile OS), which are worrying. Coming up with a Servo based browser that's both more secure due to Rust AND faster due to parallel processing, and a better native-look-and-feel story (at least on the Mac) would be good to catch up with the others. And better developer tools, as Chrome has eaten that influential segment (web devs) up.
        JupiterMoon 11y ago
        I think that firefox has improved their dev tools significantly no? I thought that Chrome and Firefox were neck and neck on this at the moment? With some features better in one and some features better in the other.
RyanZAG 11y ago
Strange thing to think. Companies do not produce browsers - employees do. In fact, not even employees. A handful of talented programmers produce browsers. All the desire in the world from a company won't improve the ability of those handful of programmers. It's actually fairly interesting. These huge mega companies are just support teams for a few programmers. All the corporate vision and endless strategies mean nothing compared to one of those programmers having a good or bad day in their work. You honestly get the feeling something somewhere is very broken when you think about it.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Strange thing to think. Companies do not produce browsers - employees do. In fact, not even employees. A handful of talented programmers produce browsers. All the desire in the world from a company won't improve the ability of those handful of programmers. Strange thing to think. As if the core mission of the company, the motivations of the management, strategic decisions to hire people and structure projects etc, the funding and priority they give to specific products etc, don't determine and affect the end product! Put that way it's as if a great browser engine can even get out of some accounting software house, if only the right programmers chance to work there.
rockdoe 11y ago
Microsoft has about 120 times the number of employees that Mozilla has. That's an insane number. If they consider the browser remotely important, they can put much more resources behind it than Mozilla ever can. Only things like the Mythical Man Month save Mozilla a bit here.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - i336_ 11y ago
    ...that is impressive. Now I know that, I'm actually looking forward to playing with the engine more than before - a concentrated braintrust of a few skilled engineers is always more ideal than a sprawling mass of seagulls (to borrow ideology from Finding Nemo :P). The flip side, of course, is that all of you have to keep your game up to quite a high degree or you're out. Respect. (I think what the Edge team as a whole has managed is really amazing - I mean, a brand new browser...) [Also... I have to ask... I've been wondering since before this announcement: is it an even remotely vague possibility that I'll ever able to natively run EdgeHTML on FreeBSD or Linux one day in the distant future, source or binary? :D]
  - mSparks 11y ago
    I have to apologise. but it shows. I simply can't take this claim it has better coverage at face value. because I only just finished testing a week or so ago and the js code we deploy that works on every platform from android through Linux mac ios and Windows. is still mostly broken on edge and doesn't even begin to work in ie. so we will still be recommending users not to use edge or ie at this time. that recommendation isn't one I make happily. but windows machines make up such an insignificant part of the market now it's an easy business decision.

inglor 11y ago

People are definitely interested. Posts about engine architecture are rare and interesting.

teh 11y ago

Super interested! I often find technical blog posts like this years later and I'm really grateful to the people who donate their time to the difficult task of writing them.

eiopa 11y ago

Super interested!

crudbug 11y ago

HalcyonicStorm 11y ago

yes please

fenomas 11y ago

Speaking as someone tuning a JS game, I focus on V8 over other engines because there are great articles around that explain in detail what v8 knows how to optimize, what causes functions to deopt, what kicks object property lookups into slow mode, etc. Articles explaining this for SpiderMonkey would be greatly appreciated!

joe_developer 11y ago
Could you recommend a few articles?
- fenomas 11y ago
  On v8 right? This one is probably the best broad overview: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/v8/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/v8/ To get into the gory details google Vyacheslav Egorov - he's a v8 engineer with a number of talks on YouTube, presentation slides, and blog posts on v8 internals. He also maintains a tool called IRhydra, that lets you examine functions after they've been compiled into v8's internal representation.
  - mraleph 11y ago
    I am glad you find my stuff useful enough to recommend it to other people! Thanks. I just wanted to point out a minor detail: I am an ex-V8 engineer - I have not been working on V8 since 2012.
    - fenomas 11y ago
      Duly noted, and thanks ;)
VerGreeneyes 11y ago
FWIW, people in Mozilla are working on a "JIT coach", which will tell you if performance critical sections of your code aren't getting JITed, and why. I believe this is almost ready for use, though I'm not sure when it will be presented.