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On Tuesday, Mozilla released Firefox 3.1 beta 2 and Google released Chrome 0.4.154.33, so it’s time for the latest installment of JavaScript performance testing.

Here’s the highlight: Though Firefox remains the leader on the SunSpider test, with a score of 2,110, Chrome edged very close with 2,140. A lower score is better; because of some variation in results, the numbers I quoted are an average of several runs.

Firefox and Chrome aren’t the only browsers out there, but they’re interesting to compare for a few reasons. First, they’re both open-source projects launched to shake up the establishment with new ideas about the browsing experience. Second, given that philosophical alignment, they’re likely to appeal to the same early-adopter crowd. Finally, both have new JavaScript engines, Chrome’s V8 and Mozilla’s TraceMonkey, which in the new beta is switched on be default.

JavaScript is used to build sophisticated Web sites such as Gmail or Google Docs, but it’s also widely used for more ordinary operations, so faster JavaScript performance is desirable. One interesting possibility Google has raised for Web applications though is to bypass JavaScript altogether and use Google’s new Native Client software, a research project that lets Web-based software run closer to the speeds of regular software on a computer.

SunSpider is only one test, though; Google has its own JavaScript benchmark on which Chrome wins hands-down. A glitch in the first Firefox beta kept me from testing it on Google’s benchmarks, but the new beta runs again, yielding a score of 182. That’s lower than the earlier Firefox 3.1 beta’s 235 score, so perhaps something is still amiss. Either way, it’s a far cry from Chrome 0.4.154.33’s score of 2,635.

The usual caveats: your mileage may vary; I ran these tests on a dual-core Lenovo T61 laptop with 3GB of memory and Windows XP. JavaScript is only one aspect of Web browsing performance, and indeed of browsers overall. Also, this software is still in beta, Chrome in particular a developer beta. Finally, I apologize to those who’ve been asking, but time constraints have kept me from trying the latest WebKit builds and Opera.

According to Mark Larson, Google’s Chrome program manager, Chrome 0.4.154.33 fixes a crash when opening the Options dialog box on 64-bit Windows and some issues using Hotmail. “Hotmail still does not properly recognize Google Chrome,” though, Larson said in his announcement of the new version, though it can be fooled into thinking it’s using a more mainstream browser. For details, check the instructions on the release notes.

Read the original post:
Firefox, Chrome virtually tied for JavaScript speed

Greasemonkey, a Firefox customization tool popular among high-powered Web surfers, is coming to Google Chrome browser.

Aaron Boodman, a Greasemonkey author and a Google programmer who’s active in the Gears project, contributed Greasemonkey support to Chrome, and the Google Operating System blog picked up on the change.

At this stage, enabling Greasemonkey requires people to use a cutting-edge developer version of the open-source browser and to launch it with a “–enable-greasemonkey” option set.

Greasemonkey lets people run scripts that modify Web page appearance. For example, back when Google’s Gmail service lacked a “delete” button, people could add one by installing the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox then downloading a particular customization script.

Google wants to improve the Greasemonkey support, for example by confining particular Greasemonkey scripts to particular Web pages and letting the browser update its scripts as it’s running.

See the rest here:
Tweaker alert: Greasemonkey coming to Chrome

Just about every browser out there now is trying to grab the crown for fastest performance for running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many increasingly sophisticated Web-based applications. The latest development is from the programmers behind Apple’s Safari.

Mozilla bragged earlier this month about TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine due to ship in Firefox 3.1 near the end of 2008. Next came Google’s Chrome, a leading feature of which is the performance of its V8 JavaScript engine. Now the WebKit programmers, whose open-source code is used in Apple’s Safari browser and the Konqueror browser of the KDE interface software sometimes used on Linux systems, have a new version of their JavaScript technology.

It’s called Squirrelfish Extreme, and the WebKit programmers said Thursday in a blog posting that it’s more than twice as fast as the first-generation Squirrelfish announced in June and more than three times faster than the current WebKit 3.1 version. They based their conclusions on one benchmark, SunSpider.

“SquirrelFish Extreme uses more advanced techniques, including fast native code generation, to deliver even more JavaScript performance,” the programmers said.

For details of Squirrelfish’s techniques–bytecode optimization, a polymorphic inline cache, a context-threaded just-in-time compiler, and a regular expression just-in-time compiler–check the WebKit blog.

Charles Ying also performed SunSpider tests that showed Squirrelfish beating Google’s V8 and Mozilla’s Tracemonkey on a 2.4GHz iMac.

See original here:
Step aside, Chrome, for Squirrelfish Extreme

Join us now for our weekly review of Web Technology news and reviews. This week we reported on the launch of Apple’s iTunes 8, analyzed AOL’s move to bring RSS and lifestreaming to the mainstream, and covered some of the best web apps to come out of DEMOfall08. On the trends side, we looked into what User Experience pros can teach us. Also we delved further into the impact of Google Chrome on the browser market. Listen to our podcast featuring a member of the Chrome team and other guests, and check out the results from our prediction question this week: which browsers will lose the most market share due to Chrome? Last but not least, we bring you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel.

Web Products

Apple Introduces iTunes 8 and New iPods

At Apple’s “Let’s Rock” special event this week, Steve Jobs introduced a new version of iTunes, the availability of HD TV shows for the American market, a new design for the iPod Nano and iPod touch, as well as a major update for the iPhone/iPod touch firmware. According to Jobs, Apple has sold 160 million iPods worldwide and now holds 73.4% of the market in the US. Check our post for more data points.

ITunes 8: The Genius in the Box

Music discovery services are definitely a hot topic right now, with Pandora, Last.fm, imeem, and others vying for users. This week, Apple joined the fray when it released iTunes 8 and its ‘Genius’ recommendation engine. After examining your iTunes library, iTunes uploads data about your library to Apple’s servers and returns back a set of information about how the songs in your library correlate to each other. Based on this, iTunes can now build playlists of similar songs and display shopping recommendations.

AOL May Try to Bring RSS and Lifestreaming Mainstream

RSS and centralized integration of activity data from multiple social networks are the kinds of technologies that only early adopters are interested in, right? AOL has the exact opposite kind of audience, does it not? Those assumptions appear to be facing serious challenge, because AOL is planning to put an RSS reader and a window for participating in multiple 3rd party social networks right onto its front page. This could change the lives of millions of people, so check out our analysis.

Also this week Yahoo! told the press that its home page will soon be home to far more content from outside the Yahoo! network than ever before. Could the era of the walled garden is over? See our post for more details.

DEMOfall 08 Coverage

Not too long ago, there were some grumblings about the state of the tech blogosphere and the industry in general. By spending so much time reading Techmeme, Twitter, FriendFeed, and the like it’s easy to get the impression that some of the most influential people in our industry today were less interested in the technology they were reviewing than they were in making a name for themselves as some sort of navel-gazing superstar. Not only that, the apps that people were fawning over were often not the kind of apps that had mainstream appeal or were solving real problems. It was as if the whole crowd was shouting at each other, trying to be heard over the noise and patting each other on the back for being so hip with all our shiny, social media-flavored toys.

Was this what the tech industry had come to, we wondered? No, that was just what the tech blogosphere had come to. This year’s DEMO conference proved to our reporter Sarah Perez that technology innovation is still alive and well.

Here is our full coverage from DEMO:

• Giftag: Social Wishlists Using Open Standards
• SpinSpotter, A New Browser Plugin To Help Spot Media Bias
• Have The News Come To You With Alerts.com
• FFWD: A Remote Control For Internet Video
• iKnow! Launches Adaptive Learning System
• SkyData Integrates Everything, Puts It On Your Smartphone
• HeyCosmo: Automate Your Life Via Your Mobile
• Invision.tv: Like A TV Guide For Internet Video
• Web 1.0 Job Sites Have New Competition: PaidInterviews
• Better Photo Management for Mac? iLovePhotos Hopes So
• Talk To Your iPhone With New Voice-Recognition App, Say Where
• Qtask: Web-Based Team Collaboration

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

User Experience: Learning from the Pros

There are more startup tech companies launching this week than almost anyone can keep track of, but any time a new service launches - one thing is key to its survival. The initial User Experience has to be compelling or any new application is going to be passed up in favor of whatever shiny object is next in line.

What’s a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. In this post are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.

RWW Live: Chrome & Its Impact on The Browser Market

The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, was on the topic of Google’s new open source browser Chrome and its potential impact in the browser market. We had 3 very special guests on the show to discuss this: Aaron Boodman from Google, a Software Engineer on the Chrome team; Chris Messina from Vidoop (formally of Firefox and Flock); and Alex Russell from The Dojo Toolkit.

Download MP3

RWW Predictions: Browser Wars 2.0

This week we ran a prediction challenge, on the topic of browsers. Google’s new browser, Chrome (our coverage), is sure to take market share from the existing players. So we asked: which of the following browsers will lose the most share (in percentage terms) between August 2008 and December 2008? Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or a tie or other? The results are on RWW Predictions and IE was most peoples pick to suffer, although many voted for Firefox too:

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

What do CIOs Think About Social Media?

The internal IT department, headed by the CIO, no longer acts as the gatekeeper for all new technology coming into the enterprise. IT may stand at the gate to the castle, but SaaS and social media startups are swimming across the moat. Internal IT can still set fire to the moat and otherwise make life difficult. But how do you make this a win/win relationship, so that they welcome your entry? Start by understanding how IT is thinking about social media.

Email us if you’re interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

The rest is here:
Weekly Wrapup, 8-12 September 2008

Time for our semi-irregular roundup of Google items:

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