More details about Microsoft’s next version of its ailing browser have been released, in the build-up to the second beta release due next month. The first beta, released in March, was aimed at web developers. It brought much-needed improvements to standards compliance, along with negligible reliability and inconsistent performance.
Beta 2 is aimed at a general audience; not just web developers who need early access to IE8 to find out what breaks (and what finally works), but a broader audience including IT staff evaluating the next browser version so they know whether to deploy it as well as end-users who just have to run the latest version of everything even if it isn’t quite finished yet. As well as the all-important standards compliance, IE8 brings a raft of new security, reliability, and management features. The official IE blog has described some of these already, and on Monday gave more details about what to expect in beta 2.
With IE8, Microsoft is attempting to solve one of the most annoying problems with today’s multi-window, multi-tab browsers; namely, the disastrous effect that a browser crash has. It is an unfortunate feature of most browsers that a crash in one tab takes down the whole browser instance. Whether the cause is a bug in the browser itself, a malicious script, or a badly-written plug-in, the effect is the same; not only does the tab that caused the problem disappear, so does the tab with your half-composed forum post, the train timetable you need to get home, and the audio stream you’re listening to.
IE8 tackles this by separating each tab into its own process, a feature it calls “Loosely Coupled IE.” Starting IE8 actually creates two processes; one process for the window frame, address bar, toolbar, and tab bar, and a second process for the tab itself. Subsequent tabs may also open in new processes. Running a tab in its own process allows that tab to crash (for any reason) without disrupting any other tab. This feature was present in Beta 1; in Beta 2, Microsoft has worked to reduce the overhead it causes and improve its performance. For example, now the processes creating the window frames are merged, so starting IE several times will only create new tabs in the existing frame.
The ratio between tabs and processes is not exactly 1:1; although this provides the most isolation, the ratio of processes to tabs will depend on machine capabilities. This process separation also resolves a major annoyance in IE in Windows Vista. In Vista, sites in different zones cannot be open in the same IE window. A file opened from the hard disk cannot coexist with a file opened from the Internet; instead, two different IE processes are required, one for each security zone. Because IE8 uses different processes for each tab, this restriction is lifted; different security zones will still use different processes behind the scenes, but they will be able to share the same window.
The final piece of the puzzle is Automatic Crash Recovery. As with LCIE, this was present in Beta 1, but has been improved for Beta 2. ACR is designed to improve the experience when the the inevitable occurs and a tab crashes. Instead of losing everything you were doing in the tab, ACR restarts the process and restores the tab’s context—in Beta 1, this meant it opened the same URL and kept the back/forward browser history.
ACR had promise in Beta 1; however, it neglected to recover the most important things—text entered into forms, and session cookies. Without these, the experience is a little frustratring; the browser reopens the right page, but you find yourself logged out and with your half-written e-mail gone. Beta 2 fixes this by recovering both form data and session cookies. This means that Beta 2 will be able to put you right back where you were before the tab crashed, with virtually no interruption.
As well as being incomplete, ACR in Beta 1 was not itself particularly reliable; it was easy to make the browser get into a never-ending cycle of crashing, restarting, recovering, and then immediately crashing (because the URL being recovered caused the crash in the first place). Microsoft has not said anything about whether this will continue to be a problem.
Of course, while better handling of crashes is no bad thing, it would be even better for the browser not to crash in the first place. Microsoft has long had an (opt-in) system for reporting crashes and hangs back to the company—Windows Error Reporting (aka, Watson). This data allows the company to locate bugs and determine which are in need of the most attention. On the blog, the IE team stated that they have committed to fixing the top 50 percent of all the Watson errors they have; this should provide a significant boost to reliability.
When IE8 is released later this year it will undoubtably be the best version of Internet Explorer ever. IE’s competition is improving all the time, and gaining in popularity, and—at least when it comes to standards compliance—is already superior today to what IE8 will deliver later in the year. Microsoft’s uphill battle to stop the rot and turn IE around is far from over.
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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.
Apple uses a new and improved JavaScript interpreter code-named SquirrelFish, which is provided on an open-source basis from the WebKit project, the same organization that makes the open-source engine used by Safari to render web pages. According to the WebKit project, the SquirrelFish engine is 1.6 times faster than the JavaScript engine in Safari 3.1.
SquirrelFish does its magic by turning JavaScript script into so-called bytecodes, an optimized code much more suitable for run-time execution than natural language-based JavaScript commands, which are longer and more complicated to interpret – and therefore are slower.
Why JavaScript performance matters
Most today’s web applications and web 2.0 sites rely on the JavaScript scripting language originally created by current Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich while he was employed by Netscape. JavaScript acts as glue that connects a user interface rendered in a web browser with a database and programming logic running in a web server. The browser’s JavaScript engine is solely responsible for interpreting and executing JavaScript commands embedded in HTML code. As a result, a browser’s JavaScript engine performance is directly related to the performance and responsiveness of a web application, contributing to an improved user experience.
The fact that many applications grow in size and become more bloated with each release means that a browser that can run web applications faster and make user interfaces more responsive on any computer is actually a big deal. You don’t have to have any specific market forecasting talent to predict that this trend may be impacting browser market shares: Speed can directly translate into more usability for most of us. Clearly, JavaScript handling is on its way to become a powerful weapon in the browser market.
SpiderMonkey, SquirrelFish, Tamarin and more
Mozilla was the first to introduce significant speed gains with Firefox 3 beta 5 (the final version is expected to ship by mid-June). Firefox has its Gecko engine to render web pages, which is generally considered to be slightly slower than Safari’s WebKit – which is largely responsible for the “fastest browser in the world” status Safari enjoys. Firefox’ JavaScript implementation is based on Mozilla’s own and decade old SpiderMonkey technology, which many considered to be the fastest JavaScript interpreter until SquirrelFish came out.
Although in beta, Firefox 3 scored with many reviewers who are praising the browser’s performance improvements, with WSJ’s Walt Mossberg declaring the browser a “winner.” But now that the SquirrelFish/Safari combination appears to be offsetting the speed gains in Firefox 3 and may set a new benchmark, we can expect more direct competition between Mozilla and Apple. Mozilla has plans to expand SpiderMonkey with Adobe’s JavaScript engine called Tamarin, included in Flash 9, which has a so-called “tracing” feature designed to enable faster code execution. However, the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark claims that SquirrelFish is at least 1.9 times faster than Tamarin.
Mozilla plans to wedge Tamarin into Firefox and match the API’s of both technologies “There are areas in which SpiderMonkey is faster than Tamarin and areas where it’s not. We’re looking to build hybrids that are best-of-breed for both worlds and we’re going to pull those into the Firefox release when ready,” Mozilla co-founder Mike Shaver recently said.
Can IE8 compete?
The big variable in this game is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, currently in beta 1 phase. IE8 is expected to deliver speed gains in JavaScript performance as well. However, Microsoft is facing a tough task. The fact that the software giant is often criticized for delivering bloated and inefficient software certainly doesn’t help. In our tests, the first beta of IE8 shows no noticeable speed gains in running web applications.
Quite the opposite is the case, actually. Websites and web applications run noticeably slower than in IE7. The whole browsing experience generally appears to be less responsive. Of course, IE8 is in an early development stage and you can bet Microsoft is going to tweak its performance. The only problem is that the software giant will have to work to raise the stakes in the browser race. If IE8 under-delivers, the market could respond with further market share erosion for IE. It is evident now that JavaScript engine performance has become a key metric in the newest race for the title of fastest browser.
The battle ahead is nicely summed by Mozilla co-founder Mike Shaver who said the following: “They [Apple] have dropped SquirrelFish in now and got a big speed up there. We’ve got more coming on our side. You’ll see this leapfrog pattern over and over. We’re not going to let anybody slack on that and the other browser vendors need to keep up, too.”
According to Net Applications, Firefox 3 captured almost one fifth (18.41%) of the browser market in May, followed by Safari 3.1 which hit 6.25%. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer continues on its pace of a slow but steady decline, ending up at 73.75% in May. Microsoft has scheduled second beta of IE8 for an August release, with a generally expected final release in the fourth quarter of this year.
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Mozilla aims to make Firefox 3 a record breaker. It wants the release of the next version of its flagship open source browser to be accompanied by a record for the most software downloads in a single 24-hour period*.
Download Day – as Mozilla dubs it – will begin the minute Firefox 3 is generally available and continue for 24 hours. Ahead of this release, expected in mid-to-late June, Mozilla has set up a website (spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord). This encourages people to organise Download Day parties, to run around collecting sign-up pledges at their university or place of work, and to place Download Day buttons on their websites.
Firefox 3 is based on Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. The browser features a cleaner layout, better bookmark handling and more stability. And it’s faster.
RC2
Mozilla decided to release a second release candidate for Firefox 3.0 at a meeting on Tuesday, in response to the discovery of 10 performance and stability bugs. The alternative would have been to patch these potential “showstoppers” after the browser shipped. But another round of testing is the safer option – not least from the standpoint of public relations. This will probably set back the official launch by five days or so.
Last November Mozilla hit back at claims that multiple bugs in its forthcoming Firefox 3 browser would be ignored in order to meet release schedules. At that point Mozilla was grappling with 700 bugs marked as “blockers” (i.e. a flaw serious enough to justify delaying a release, or at least merit a closer inspection).
Skip forward six months and we’re at the point where the browser is in fine-tuning to eliminate the last few high-priority bugs.
In a development list posting on Tuesday, Mozilla’s lead developer Mike Beltzner explained the strict patch acceptance policy for Firefox 3 RC2. “Just because we’ve decided to product another release candidate does not mean that we are accepting new patches – only those which fix issues that have been identified as required fixes for RC2 will be accepted, and even then your patch must come with a risk assessment and tests,” he writes. “Many of the issues to be fixed in RC2 have already been patched, reviewed, approved and landed.”
* Mozilla is trying for a record in a new category, according to a representative of the firm. That means it doesn’t have an existing mark to better. The open source browser outfit aims to secure over 1.6m downloads over 24 hours.
Firefox will be available from multiple locations. We must assume the bandwidth and server capacity will be in place to service the rush.
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