Google surprised many when it launched the first beta version of its browser Chrome. The reason for this is not just because Google had denied its very existence but that it worked so well at this early stage. One of the most discussed features of Chrome was the JavaScript engine, dubbed V8, developed by a team in Denmark. Chrome’s V8 engine proved to be faster than SpiderMonkey, used in Firefox 3, but Mozilla has been working a successor, called TraceMonkey, for some time now and it is expected to debut with FF3.1.
When Mozilla published the latest build of Firefox 3.1 alpha a few days ago, it had included a bug fix for the JavaScript benchmark SunSpider. Coincidently it decided to test the new JavaScript engine in SunSpider and compare to Google Chrome. It turned out that TraceMonkey was between 19% to 28% faster Chrome’s V8 engine.
If you break up the tests in SunSpider you see that TraceMonkey and V8 have their strengths and weaknesses. Even if this a test tells only parts of the whole story, it really shows that Mozilla has not been sloping off, even though its biggest partner has now launched a browser of its own.
Mozilla’s CEO Brendan Eich, who also contributes to Firefox’s JavaScript engine, has prized Google Chrome in his latest blog post;
“V8 is great work, very well-engineered, with room to speed up too. (And Chrome looks good to great — the multi-process architecture is righteous, but you expected no less praise from an old Unix hacker like me.)”
Firefox 3.1 should be released in Q4.
