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There are several inaccuracies in this article, * "Mozilla is tinkering with a SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine that supports Google’s V8 core and is currently d
by azakai 16y ago
There are several inaccuracies in this article,
* "Mozilla is tinkering with a SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine that supports Google’s V8 core and is currently developed as “V8Monkey”" - I assume they mean the side project some people are doing, to let SpiderMonkey support the V8 API, which would let it be used say in node.js. The article implies that that is the latest "buzz" in JS engines, but there are plenty of actual recent stories in that area, and all major JS engines are constantly improving.
* "Mozilla Firefox 5 Beta Build 1" - No such thing exists. Firefox 5 is in Aurora, which is pre-beta, and there is no Firefox Beta at the moment (just nightly, aurora, and stable).
* They use Chromium nightly, but not a Firefox nightly (Firefox 6), which is odd. For the other browsers - Opera and IE - I don't know if nightly builds are available, but for Firefox they are.
As to the content, I agree with Google that it is interesting to see 'steady-state' results, of running a benchmark many times. For some web pages, that clearly matters. However, the normal SunSpider is still very interesting - it says something about the speed of smaller web pages that try to load quickly, but still need some amount of JavaScript. Quick loading and responsiveness are very important there, and in fact that is exactly the sort of thing Google usually stresses in its own websites, and ironic that Chrome is the slowest there. But in any case, both benchmarks are interesting.
- abraham 16y agoIt looks like Fx5b1 is available through Mozilla's FTP server. http://www.conceivablytech.com/7132/products/first-firefox-5-beta-build-posted http://www.conceivablytech.com/7132/products/first-firefox-5...
- azakai 16y agoHmm, that article is mistaken as well. A Firefox 5 beta should be available in a few weeks. This is the official page for all Firefox channels: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/ http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/
- magicalist 16y agoironic maybe, but when the difference between the best and worst performers over the entire benchmark is 3 frames at 60fps, it isn't unreasonable to think of sunspider as indicative of not much any more. as js engine improvements are starting to level off, the tradeoffs that have to be made become more complex. optimizing for one case can cause a regression in another (just take a look at the heuristics used for when tracing should kick in for trace-/jaegermonkey). at some point, insisting on monotonically decreasing times for a test that takes a quarter of a second becomes pretty much akin to the megahertz or megapixel races.
- ErikCorry 16y agoI agree, but I do have one nitpick: I've seen this suggestion several places, but I don't really think it's accurate to say that JS engine improvements are levelling off. See http://blog.chromium.org/2010/12/new-crankshaft-for-v8.html http://blog.chromium.org/2010/12/new-crankshaft-for-v8.html Improvements to SunSpider scores, on the other hand, are levelling off, as you note.