Mozilla has published the first Firefox build that integrates a new JavaScript engine that aims to match the performance in IE9 and reduces the gap to Safari, Opera and Chrome. The JavaScript performance is pretty dramatic and, at least on our test system, Firefox 4 is now faster than IE9 PP4.
No visual Surprises: Firefox 4.0 b6-pre with JaegerMonkey Engine
A few weeks ago, Mozilla’s outlook in terms of JavaScript performance was not so great. It was the slowest JavaScript browser among the popular packages – Chrome, Safari, IE9 and Opera. JaegerMonkey, a new JavaScript engine that is built on top of the old SpiderMonkey (which was originally used until Firefox 2.x), made progress, but it seemed to be not fast enough for the Firefox 4 release schedule.
JaegerMonkey (JM) has surfaced nine days late, but we now we are finally getting a first-hand look at the new browser as Mozilla has released an experimental build of the software. Subjectively, the (Minefield) 4.0 b6-pre build feels much more nimble than the Beta 5 and some JavaScript-heavy webpages are loading notably faster.
In a first quick test on our Intel quad-core system, Firefox JM (officially called Firefox JS) completely the Sunspider test in 451.8 ms, which is ahead of Firefox 4 Beta 5 (518.6 ms) and also ahead of the latest platform preview of IE9 (474.2 ms). There seems to be substantial deviation of these benchmark results on different types of hardware, as Mozilla itself does not indicate Firefox JM to be faster than IE9 PP4. So please take these results with a grain of salt and feel free to post your own results in the comments section below.
In Google V8, Firefox JM came in at a score of 2042, ahead of the 935 of Beta 5. IE9 scores in this test (on our system) 1177 points. We noticed, however, that the Beta 5 of Firefox is significantly faster in hardware acceleration tests such as Microsoft’s Psychedelic Wheel. The Beta 5′s advantage was 1769 vs. 1075 revolutions.
As far as we can see, Mozilla is back in the game. JM may not be able to touch Webkit at this time, but it appears to be very competitive and actually ahead of Microsoft’s upcoming IE9 Beta, which we will get to see and take out for a drive on September 15.
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