Implications of the Mozilla/Adobe Partnership 104
Fraggle writes "Recently the Mozilla Foundation and Adobe announced a partnership, working together on the next generation
JavaScript/ActionScript JIT Virtual Machine. The Browser Den looks at what this means for the future of scripting in Mozilla, and how this partnership with Adobe may affect Mozilla's support for other technologies such as SVG." From the article: "On the Mozilla side the plan is to integrate to code with SpiderMonkey which is Mozilla's current JavaScript implementation that is written in C. This is needed because Tamarin is not a drop-in replacement for SpiderMonkey as it provides necessary features that are not available in Tamarin. The combined SpiderMonkey with integrated Tamarin should not have any problems with old JavaScript and should show a performance boost for most. However, skilled scripters are sure to find ways of optimising performance to get even more gains."
Is Open Source finally ready for prime time? (Score:1)
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If big business is trying to muscle in, then we should all run for the hills.
Is itsatrap relevant here?
I might be overreacting, and we already have one big benevolent overlord guiding us (the Vorlons ermmmmm I mean IBM), do we need others?
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The *worst* that could happen is the Mozilla/Firefox 'brand name' becomes tainted and people move away from it in droves. How this could feasibly happen I don't know, it isn't likely at all. Either way I couldn't give a monkeys butt about the brand, I care about the product. So I real
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True to a degree. But the 'brand' of OSS projects is the center around which developers gather. If the 'brand' is subverted or branches out in a way that dissipates that center, then developers will disperse and/or cease to participate.
'The Mozilla Project' is a distinctily different 'brand' than 'Adobe (tm) Mozilla.'
Personally, I try to stay at arms length from anything currently made by Adobe. They've been taken over b
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Amazing (Score:2, Insightful)
HTML either, but that preconception was crushed when I saw the money those art school dropouts were making.
I just hope that they don't embed Flash player into the browser. That would suck royally.
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Don't disparage something you don't understand. It's like saying you hate all music cause you heard a few Britney Spears songs.
Take a look at OpenLaszlo. [openlaszlo.org]
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No, it is like saying you don't want a radio without an "off" button.
Most Net Flash content is crap. It's mainly used for ads. I, for one, surf with FlashBlock and only allow the damn thing to play when absolutely neccessary.
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I can't speek for the GP, but I understand Flash. Flash is about giving control to the content producers at the expense of the consumers. I am a comsumer who likes control, ergo I don't like like flash.
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http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/10/whats_
http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/10/flash-player-9-
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I know Rexx and VBScript can also do that and I'm sure they're not the only ones. It's very handy but hardly unique.
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-Ben
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I recently discovered javascript, which I didn't give much attention before, and I was surprised to discover that it's actually a pretty good language. It pretty much does all the things I like in Lua (functional programming among other things), and even a few more things that could be useful to me.
The downside is that lua currently beats the crap out of it when it comes to performance.
The ne
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Some speed benchmarks of Tamarin vs. Spidermonkey are here [playercore.com].
Some additional benchmarks of Flash Player 9 (which is essentially identical to Tamarin in this context) vs SpiderMonkey can be found here [oddhammer.com].
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From Javascript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language [crockford.com]:
There goes the neighborhood (Score:2, Funny)
Say What? (Score:5, Insightful)
I presume the article means to say that the Tamarin engine will be coupled with SpiderMonkey's APIs? Because I don't see how you could "combine" two separate Javascript engines and expect a usable result. That would be like "combining" Windows and Mac OS X to make a better operating system. It doesn't quite work that way.
Re:Say What? (Score:5, Informative)
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I bet on neko having AMD64 JIT first.
I wouldn't be so sure, there will be many more working on Tamarin then on the Neko VM [nekovm.org]. :)
But who cares which one will be first, haXe [haxe.org] can be compiled for both.
Re:Say What? (Score:5, Funny)
That sound you hear is the thousands of Microsoft Windows programmers kicking the dirt and going back to the drawing board.
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It's kind of like the LLVM project's C++ compilers - they took GCC, and modified it to produce LLVM bytecode which could be fed into their own JIT.
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>operating system. It doesn't quite work that way.
FX: Head of Vista development team "Doh!"
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Why not? OS X is a train wreck of OS 9, BSD, Mach, and NeXT code and it works pretty well.
Slashdot (Score:2)
Will this ever see the light of day? (Score:1)
What I want to know is when will we actually see any benefits from this?
From TFA:
So we have FX 3 being based on Mozilla 1.9 which means it will most li
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* http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/Schedule [mozilla.org]
* http://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseRoadmap [mozilla.org]
Reviewing this should be done with an eye to GPLv3 (Score:2)
Whether the deal is good or bad, or partly good and partly bad, it is a good example for thinking about what patent protections should be in GPLv3 [fsfe.org].
A good focus for the discussion, IMO.
However, skilled scripters are sure to.. (Score:2, Funny)
Like having Samy as your hero.
First post ! (Score:2, Interesting)
Good news (Score:3, Informative)
That's swell (Score:1, Interesting)
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True.
Try enabling javascript in a browser with javascript disabled by the administrator from javascript.
That's like asking C to press the power button on your computer for you. If it's not turned on, it's not turned on.
Lots and lots of implications (Score:5, Informative)
On the side of Mozilla, it means much faster, JIT JS engine, and since you know that Firefox's XUL depends heavily on JS to run, it may have big impact on the performance of Firefox as a whole and change the perception some have of Firefox as "bloated" and "slow".
This is just a guess though. Here's what's really fun.
Adobe is now working on its next generation "web platform", code named Apollo. Apollo's long term goals are to merge Flash, HTML/JS/CSS and PDF in one single "web platform", for internet applications.
Apollo is not a browser, you can think of it sort of like the
The first version of Apollo is not going to merge all three technologies into one, but it'll integrate them to work together. This means, you can have Apollo app that is based on AJAX with flash in it. Or Flash project with HTML in it. Or, I guess, Flash with PDF in it.. All sorts of combinations.
Adobe announced that they will NOT develop a browser on their own for Apollo, and that they are researching what to use.
I'll be honest, I thought it's apparent they'll pick Opera. Opera is faster than Firefox, it's portable to mobile platforms (and this is important to Adobe), and both Macromedia and Adobe have rich partnership with Opera already.
For example, Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG on Mac used to be Opera for a long time, and maybe it still is (on Windows, as far as I know, it's custom built).
And even now, the entire help system of Adobe uses built-in Opera browser. Even their "Bridge" image browser, is in fast running on Opera.
But now, as they contribute big chunks of Flash 9 (the script engine) to Mozilla, it means only one thing: Adobe has decided on a browser.
Apollo will feature a version of Gecko with Tamarin for a script engine.
Currently Adobe Reader (PDF) uses SpiderMonkey for its script engine, but when Tamarin is good enough to replace SpikerMonkey in Firefox, it'll be good enough to do it in Adobe Reader.
Hence, one step forward towards Adobe's vision of unified HTML/Flash/PDF platform. Interesting times.
Re:Lots and lots of implications (Score:5, Informative)
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Interesting, didn't know that. It's strange that of all browsers on the market, Adobe will pick the least popular one, and one which needs a lot of work before it even runs on Windows (I know work is being done on it, but it's far from done).
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Not to belittle their work, but they did "only" port it from one Unix-like system to another. Porting it to Windows will be rather more work, I suspect.
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See here (it seems to be now defunct, but they did have a working release out at one point):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(web_browser)/ [wikipedia.org]
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For the majority o
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Is Adobe/Macromedia losing it? (Score:3, Interesting)
This has meant that their core products, such as Dreamweaver and the Flash development application, have been rapidly becoming crappier. D
Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal (Score:1)
I find this idea a bit scary. HTML, Flash, and PDF do two completely different things, and attempting to combine them is not going to end with a super-browser but with a monstrous train-wreck something like Acrobat Viewer, which inserts buttons in my excel toolbar without asking, takes forever to load and is generally a waste of space.
This announcement alone doesn't mean that Adobe will take this direction,
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I find this idea a bit scary. HTML, Flash, and PDF do two completely different things, and attempting to combine them is not going to end with a super-browser but with a monstrous train-wreck something like Acrobat Viewer, which inserts buttons in my excel toolbar without asking, takes forever to load and is generally a waste of space.
There's not a lot of point in integrating tools that do the same thing. The functions of Flash, PDF, and HTML are complementary. Not that it means any given toolset to work
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The JIT is currently x86-32 for Windows and MacOSX, plus PPC-32 for MacOSX. There is also a prototype ARM implementation. x86-32 for Linux is functional but has not yet been merged into the CVS tree. x86-64 (Windows + Mac + Linux) is under development.
If by Mozilla you mean WebKit (Score:2)
They actually announced they're using WebKit for Apollo.
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:develOpenLaszlo is the big winner from all of this! (Score:2)
The OpenLaszlo [openlaszlo.org] Legals Project [openlaszlo.org] will benefit immensely from this! OpenLaszlo is in a position to take excellent advantage of the now open source AMV2 JavaScript engine, for the benefit of users as well as developers. Not only will AVM2 make OpenLaszlo applications run faster on Firefox, but opening up the AVM2 virtual machine will make it possible to develop much more powerful debuggers and integrated development environments.
-Don
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Credible OSS response to .NET (on the desktop) (Score:4, Interesting)
Some early benchmarks [kotay.com] comparing SpiderMonkey, what would become Tamarin, and JScript.NET. are on my site [kotay.com]... interesting is that neither CLR, nor Tamarin provide a big boost when you use the features of JavaScript that make it more interesting than just plain old C. Wonder how much a real world boost this will be for the integration complexity? (i.e. is this another Netscape 6? Perhaps buckling down and fixing SpiderMonkey might serve better...)
--
graphically speaking [kotay.com]
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I understand
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It's free now, of course.
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Don't rush to judgement on this without looking at the code. One of the design criteria for the JIT was to avoid this problem. Flash Player 9 (which uses this VM) can load and start executing jitted code very quickly. (Is "jitted" a real word?)
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No it hasn't all they have done is to convert their VB programmers to VB.NET or C# programmers and they VC++ developers to C#. It's not like they converted java programmers or anything. The truth is that VB programmers were going to "upgrade" to anything MS put out no matter what it was.
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---
graphically speaking [kotay.com]
About SVG (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no need for Adobe to make such a deal. Anyone who has tried using SVG on Firefox knows that the code renders so slowly as to be almost unusable, and lacks support for a tremendous number of SVG features. On top of that Adobe's own staff were always the big force behind SVG, now that Adobe has pulled out of SVG development its safe to say that SVG has no future outside of the tiny community of inkscape users.
Aside from the video codecs--which are no doubt entangled in far too many patent issues for Adobe to publish the standards--Flash is just as open as SVG, and it's a shame that open standards pundits refuse to stop pretending otherwise. It makes them sound just as stupid as the HD-DVD evangelists who pretend that HD-DVD is any less proprietary than Blu-Ray, and its hard to convince people that standards-based web development is important when this kind of garbage keeps getting spewed out.
SVG will eventually get yanked from Firefox not because of sleazy deals between Adobe and the Mozilla foundation, but due to the W3C not being behind SVG, SVG not having enough developers, the majority of SVG content on the web being experimental projects, and lack of software support for animated SVG content.
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Adobe Labs [adobe.com] still has some stake in SVG.
> its safe to say that SVG has no future outside of the tiny community of inkscape users.
All major browser manufacturers have plans for SVG at the moment, even IE has plans to eventually include SVG.
> the majority of SVG content on the web being experimental projects
Yeah, those experimental projects like Google Maps [codedread.com] and Microsoft Live Local [codedread.com] and Dojo [kylescholz.com]...
And for those who cite that SVG is "bloated" because it's XM
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Compression doesn't help with the bloat caused by having to maintain a DOM.
Even if you take the SVG Tiny route and not have a DOM, you have to _parse_ said XML. There are libraries for this, but efficient it is not.
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I can inline flash elements in my (x)html page?
I'm allowed to write my own viewer for it?
BTW... Konqueror has good support for non-animated/non-scripted SVG already. Soon, it will fix those flaws as well. Webkit has about the same level of support, and there's a committment to make SVG a first-class image format for pages. Opera's support is stellar, including the animation/scripting parts. And Firefox isn't too shabby either.
As far as I know, that's all 4
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No, but that question is irrelevant for the vast majority of end-users. Anything complex enough to be worth rendering in SVG isn't going to be something that there's any reason to look at the source for, aside from satisfying the personal curiosity of people with nothing better to do.
No, but again, why does it matter if you can? Again, this might be a cute idea for a hobbyist, but not for someone with somethin
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I can open up an
You claimed:
No, but that question is irrelevant for the vast majority of end-users.
But originally you had said...
Aside from the video codecs--...--Flash is just as open as SVG
So, you're wrong on two counts. One is being fallacious in bring up the vast-majority of end-users, who don't care about open source/standards in the first place. The second, is denying that plain-text-readability is unimportant in the context of this conversation, which is whe
not so sure about SVG (Score:4, Informative)
I was really hoping that they'd go the other way--that with the purchase of Macromedia, they'd roll SVG support into the hugely popular Flash plug-in. I wish I were wrong, but my guess is that Adobe, just like MS or anyone else, would rather back a proprietary solution (that they own) than an open one.
* and, the funny thing is, the MSIE/Adobe combination--on Mac and Windows--was the best. You could print a page with lots of embedded SVG images, and it worked! Safari with Adobe's plugin, or Mozilla with the plugin or natively, would print each image on a separate page, if at all. (Though I haven't tested FF 2.0 yet.) But MSIE/Adobe printed just as you saw on screen.
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This was never the reason why SVG was promising. There have been imagine manipulation libraries available to scripting languages for a long time. I remember using GD in Perl to create GIF images "out of thin air" as you put it. That was in 1996.
The strength of SVG is that it's vector-based. This allows developers to produce images that can be resized on-the-f
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What javaScript needs (Score:1)
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It's getting that, and a bunch of other cool stuff, in the ECMAScript 4 version that Tamarin will implement.
To see the current working proposals for ECMA for, go here: http://developer.mozilla.org/es4/ [mozilla.org]
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good news and bad news (Score:1)
good points are that if the co-operation meant better compatability, (if i made a site in go-live then it would definately work in firefox, or firefox could be made to adapt to go-live standard content) then i'd be happy!
bad news could be that firefox becomes closed source, and this could be a precursor to a buy-out. first, adobe are tempting the execs, getting friendly, and showing them what substantial funding culminates to... then deciding that, somehow, a coropor
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And Adobe are open sourceing Tamarin - so again, no closed source. This is not a trap.