Linked by Adam S on Tue 26th Aug 2008 21:32 UTC, submitted by Moulinneuf
"Poor Microsoft. This week, the Redmond, Wash., giant is gearing up for the next big release of its Web browser, a leap from Internet Explorer 7 to IE 8. When open-source competitor Mozilla released its last update of Firefox in June, the Web went wild: People downloaded more than 8 million copies in 24 hours. Microsoft's release might not have such a frat party feel. Even as it gears up to release IE 8, the developers behind the Firefox Web browser are experimenting with a new technology that sharpens the threat their browser software poses to Microsoft's most valuable businesses. The new technology, dubbed TraceMonkey, promises to speed up Firefox's ability to deliver complex applications." While many have abandoned Microsoft's browser offerings, Microsoft will be introducing an innovative new type of selective privacy mode called InPrivate with IE8.
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Member since:
2005-07-12
"The world is moving toward Flex and Silverlight for web application delivery. I don't think MS is really that worried about a super bump in javascripts speed on Firefox."
Not really. If this were the case then the massive amount of Ajax based apps would not exist. Something like TraceMonkey greatly expands the capability of Ajax based apps.
The other thing is, JavaScript is completely free to develop with, with tools for all platforms (free and proprietary) and runs in all browsers.
While you can do Flex and Silverlight development with just the SDKs, that is no small chore. To be truly productive, you need good tools. In both cases, the tools are quite expensive (FlexBuilder and Expression Blend, respectively), and in the case of Silverlight, the tools only run on Windows.
Finally, both Flash and Silverlight are big CPU hogs, and are known to crash browsers.
In other words, Ajax/Javascript based web apps aren't going away any time soon, and stuff like TraceMonkey, and Google Gears, make them all the more compelling.