Ilya Kozhevnikov

Browser Newsletter #26

June 14, 2008

Announcing SquirrelFish

WebKit’s core JavaScript engine just got a new interpreter, code-named SquirrelFish.

SquirrelFish is fast—much faster than WebKit’s previous interpreter. Check out the numbers. On the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, SquirrelFish is 1.6 times faster than WebKit’s previous interpreter.

SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.

SquirrelFish owes a lot of its design to some of the latest research in the field of efficient virtual machines, including research done by Professor M. Anton Ertl, et al, Professor David Gregg, et al, and the developers of the Lua programming language.

Read more…
© Surfin’ Safari, 02/06/08

Introducing IE=EmulateIE7

Bill Gates’ recent Tech Ed keynote and Tony Chor’s follow-up blog announced that IE8 Beta 2 will be available in August in many languages. We are encouraging sites to get ready for Beta 2 prior to release as it will present a big jump in IE8 browsing traffic.

What does “getting ready for IE8” mean for web sites? IE8 displays content in IE8 Standards mode – its most standards-compliant layout mode – by default. In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed how this aligns with our commitment to Web standards interoperability. However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of IE to display differently than intended. This creates a “get ready” call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in IE8.

The preferred response to this call to action is to update the site to ensure that IE8 is provided with standards content fitting the DOCTYPE. However, we know it is very important to give site owners the chance to update site content on their schedule without affecting user experience. As such, we provide a meta-tag that tells IE8 to display an entire site or a specific page like it did in IE7.

about:mozilla - Firefox 3 RC2, Governance, Accessibility, Bugdays, Acid3, T-shirts, and more…

Now that mozilla-central, the source code repository for the release of Firefox after 3.0, is open, a bunch of patches fixing bugs affecting our score on the Acid3 test have landed [...]

Firefox Keeps Nipping at Microsoft

The latest version of its Web browser should help Mozilla take a bigger bite of the market

Firefox 3 and Safari 4 in browser speed race

Most of today’s web sites and web applications are built using the JavaScript scripting language. Some may say that a trend towards the fine-tuning of JavaScript interpreters in modern browsers was just a matter of time since any such optimization translates into performance gains. Mozilla recently launched the browser speed race with Firefox 3, which delivers more speed than any other previous Firefox version. Apple answered with Safari 4, claiming the browser’s JavaScript engine has been accelerated by 53%. Welcome to the browser speed race.

Safari 4 has just been seeded to the developers at Apple’s developer conference. The manufacturer claims that the software has a 53% faster JavaScript engine than the preceding and current version 3.1 (based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test conducted on iMac with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at 2.8 GHz, with 2 GB of RAM and running under Mac OS X Snow Leopard.) Although Firefox 3 RC3 was the first to deliver significant JavaScript performance improvement, Apple apparently is exceeding those gains with Safari 4.

Third Firefox 3 Release Candidate available for download

The third Firefox 3 Release Candidate is now available for download. It contains a single change for Mac OS X users only; there is no change for users running previous Firefox Release Candidate versions on Windows or Linux.

What’s Coming in Internet Explorer 8 for IT Professionals?

Yesterday at Tech Ed IT Pro 2008 in Orlando we announced some of the enhancements we’re making in Internet Explorer 8 to help IT Professionals deploy and manage IE8 within their organization. We wanted to share those with the IT Pros on our blog.

Slipstream Support in Internet Explorer 8 [...] Application Compatibility and Internet Explorer 8 [...] Security in Internet Explorer 8 [...] Updates to the IEAK [...]

Firefox 3 To Be Released On June 17th

Mozilla has been announcing Release Candidates for Firefox 3 consistently for the past month. In fact, Firefox 3 RC 3 was just released earlier today. One could guess that the time for an official release was right around the corner, but we wouldn’t have guessed it’d be this soon. Only hours after RC3, and after 34 months of development, the company has announced that Firefox 3 will be officially released next Tuesday, June 17th.

Firefox Mobile concept video

Aza Raskin, one of the human interface experts hired last year by Mozilla, has released a five minutes video of a very early prototype of what Firefox Mobile’s interface may look like.

As you can see in the video below, the design aims to overcome two of the most common limitations in mobile devices: a small screen that translates into small user interface elements and a small content window, and a handicapped user experience compared to desktop browsers.

Opera 9.5

Today we released the final public release of our flagship Web browser, Opera 9.5. Opera’s cross-device expertise, support for open Web standards and commitment to speed and performance has culminated into our most powerful browser yet.

Firefox 3.1 (Shiretoko) planned features draft

As Firefox 3 approaches its grand debut this next Tuesday, for Mozilla developers it means the end of a development cycle and the start of another. Firefox 3.next is the tentative name for the next relatively minor update to the Firefox 3 branch, which is most likely to become Firefox 3.1.

A very early draft of planned features reveals that as expected, this release will be mainly about landing stuff that didn’t make it on time for the Firefox 3, along with the usual performance, stability and security bug fixes.

Visual tab switching and tab searching/filtering were both tried for Firefox 3, abandoned for other more critical features, and are being considered for 3.1. Ctrl+Tab, a extension developed by Dao Gottwald implements both of them displaying a thumbnail of the opened tabs when pressing Ctrl + Tab to switch tabs.

Browser Newsletter #26

Announcing SquirrelFish

Introducing IE=EmulateIE7

about:mozilla - Firefox 3 RC2, Governance, Accessibility, Bugdays, Acid3, T-shirts, and more…

Firefox Keeps Nipping at Microsoft

Firefox 3 and Safari 4 in browser speed race

Third Firefox 3 Release Candidate available for download

What’s Coming in Internet Explorer 8 for IT Professionals?

Firefox 3 To Be Released On June 17th

Firefox Mobile concept video

Opera 9.5

Firefox 3.1 (Shiretoko) planned features draft

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