1. Open your fancy Firefox 3 browser.
2. Click on the awesomebar and type in ‘youtube’.
3. Post the first four videos that come up.

Here are mine. So f-ing random.

Cool part about these patches is that after various outparamdel special-casing and manual cleanup the line count is reduced by 10-30% while maintaining existing functionality!

Love to see this stuff making a difference in our code base. Go go gadget Taras!

Via John.

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

In a world in which we’re constrained to a one page article on cnn or 5 minutes in the nightly news it’s nice to hear someone spend a good half an hour explaining what’s going on. Something as complex and important as this requires time to explain.

The ARM backend is about 2,000 lines of code and is still in earlyish stages – but it’s working. It’s a great first step to bring fast JS perf to ARM-based mobile platforms.

and I was proud to support him from the very beginning of his political career

because from the first time I met him I knew him as the most extraordinary candidate for public service I had ever known

I had known politicians from state representatives to the president but I had never met anybody who matched my ideals about what a public servant should be

none before had the mix of passion, intelligence, commitment and idealism that as a public servant I thought they should have and that obama did

and nor have I met anybody since

I love this message. It’s positive for a change. Not talking about differences or what the other guy is doing. It’s focused on all the right things to talk about and it’s a strong personal reminder of why I like Obama (and Mr. Lessig!) so much, independent of any campaign for office.

“I think that the next 18 months we’re going to see a 100 to 1,000 fold speed increase in JavaScript as Google and the guys at Mozilla are going to kick us all in the arse and make our JavaScript jittered,” Microsoft senior program manager Scott Hanselman told the audience, days after Google released its Chrome browser, which features faster JavaScript technology.

[...]

“It’s going to be hard to tell if it’s going to be Silverlight or JavaScript we’re going to use for our applications,” he said. “I think in the end JavaScript is going to be a bigger competitor to Silverlight than Flash is.”

Hell yes, we’re making the web kick ass.

In terms of claims some members of the V8 team have been bragging a little bit about how V8 is “many times faster” than TraceMonkey. In fact, some guarantees may have been made.

Based on the data above, we’re running about 20% faster than V8 on SunSpider. While I’m sure there will be changes to each of the engines in the coming months I think that the claim that “many times faster” is ludicrous on its face and should be tempered by actual data. [ Note that the Google test is recursion heavy, something we're adding to TraceMonkey right now. This explains the gap on that one type of test. See Brendan's post above or John's post below for more details. ]

It’s also important to realize another fact. Google has had a small army of people working on the V8 engine for two whole earth years. We’re about 60 days into TraceMonkey and we’re already starting to match the performance characteristics of V8. As Brendan put it:

What spectators have to realize is that this contest is not a playoff where each contending VM is eliminated at any given hype-event point. We believe that Franz&Gal-style tracing has more “headroom” than less aggressively speculative approaches, due to its ability to specialize code, making variables constant and eliminating dead code and conditions at runtime, based on the latent types inherent in almost all JavaScript programs. If we are right, we’ll find out over the next weeks and months, and so will you all.

If you want data across browsers you should look at this post from John Resig that contains some graphics that give relative performance of various browsers including Safari, Firefox 3.0.1, IE, etc. His overview is great and gives a much wider view of relative browser performance.

Also as a side note because I have your attention. There are some bizarre and incorrect claims made in the comic about garbage collection. Brendan puts things right as a comment in John’s post:

@Ben: Chrome has a nice GC: exact rooting, generational with copying. Single-threaded, too (not an option for SpiderMonkey, which is used in AT&T 1-800-555-1212 and 411 AVR massively multi-threaded services built by tellme.com, now owned by Microsoft!). It definitely helps cut down on pauses and keep memory use flatter.

The Chrome comic book did have one piece of misinformation, though: it said other browsers’ engines use conservative GC, and have false positive problems because they can’t distinguish random integers from pointers into the heap. This is not true of Firefox, IE, or Opera.

We do live in interesting times.

I love what google chrome represents. The work that we’ve been doing inside of the Mozilla project over the last ten years has really paid off. The fact that Google believes that they can launch a browser based on new technology means that the market is alive.

Apple is making releases, Mozilla is making releases, even big slow Microsoft is making releases. The rate of browser releases is getting faster, not slower. Google’s browser beta is a sign of health. JavaScript is evolving and being seen as a general purpose language. People are already embedding SpiderMonkey into a lot of other apps. The work that Mozilla has been doing on JavaScript performance with TraceMonkey and Google has been doing with V8 means that it can reach more and more use cases.

It’s also great to see the end user features flowing from browser to browser. The malware/phishing stuff mentioned in the comic is already shipping in Firefox 3. JS performance is something that everyone is working on. Inside of Mozilla we’ve been talking about the multi-process model that they have decided to use in order to get proper rights mgmt on the mac and windows. IE is including some of these random features in IE8 and we’ll be including a lot of them as well in Firefox 3.x. Two items that come to mind are worker threads and geolocation, features that are already undergoing testing as part of the Firefox 3.1 work. The fact that everyone is sharing ideas and moving along the same lines is great for users and great for the web. It’s starting to feel like a healthy economy of ideas.

We haven’t seen the browser itself yet. So I’ll wait until they actually get code and downloads up to comment on any of that. Given some of the features that are featured in the comic book, it will be interesting to see what the role of data and privacy will be in the product. But more on that once they actually put up something for people to play with.

As a side note, the comic is a great piece of storytelling and outbound marketing. Tells you everything you need to know to re-tell the Google Chrome story to other people without any of the drudgery of a spec or product sheet. For those of us who are interested in how things are sold and marketed, it’s a great piece of work.