javascript engine

Ahead of an official release tomorrow, Firefox 9 has winged its way to various mirrors across the web and is now available to download from the official Firefox website — no messing around with a hammered Nightly FTP server this time, oh no!

The first fruits of Mozilla’s attempt to make a Chrome OS-like Firefox operating system — Boot 2 Gecko — are now beginning to take shape in the Nightly builds of Firefox for Android.

Dubbed “WebAPI,” these recent additions allow Firefox to access an Android device’s hardware through a JavaScript API.

As of the latest Nightly, Firefox 11 for Android can now read the battery state, capture images from the camera, send SMSes, and trigger the vibrator motor.

Firefox’s single largest consumer of RAM, its JavaScript engine SpiderMonkey, is going on the mother of all diets. At any one time, SpiderMonkey’s memory footprint can be over 50% of Firefox’s total usage — the JavaScript on the ExtremeTech homepage, for example, uses no less than 115MB of memory — and slipstreaming SpiderMonkey is by far the best change that Mozilla can make to keep Firefox on the desktop svelte and competitive with Chrome and IE, and Firefox on Android less sluggish.

Over the last couple of weeks, Mozilla has finally stepped up its 64-bit testing process. There are now five slaves dedicated to building Firefox for Windows x64, which means that from Firefox 8 and onwards, you’ll be able to pick up 64-bit builds that are functionally identical to its 32-bit cousins but operating in native 64-bit CPU and memory space.

The latest Microsoft browser is state of the art--at least for now—-with its support of GPU hardware acceleration, HTML5 compliant video, audio and graphics features and a new JavaScript engine.

The first Firefox 4 beta since September marks the wider debut of the JagerMonkey JavaScript engine, as well as improved font handling and further implementation of hardware acceleration.

Birth of the regex sandbox

I decided today to do a proper blog post to explain my reasons for creating regex sandboxes.

I don’t often write a lot of words on this blog partly because I’m not very good a making long meaningful sentences and partly because I think the point can often be made in less words.

Hopefully this will be useful for someone writing filters.

Even though we firmly believe IE6 must die, it’s not going away any time soon.

Almost exactly a year after the last release, the latest version of Firefox, the world’s second most used browser, arrived today in over 70 languages, and it’s already spreading

Remember when we said that Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 was probably the last beta release before the final version 3.5?

Well, it’s not entirely true. There’s a Firefox 3.5 Preview release out, aimed primarily at developers.

The good news?