After speed boost, Firefox a developer default?

Firefox is already plenty fast. In one test, it comes in just behind Safari in speed, but in this case, "slightly slower" still means "blazingly fast."

Thanks to Mozilla's pioneering work with TraceMonkey, however, Firefox is about to become even faster. Think massive performance boost.

CNET's Stephen Shankland has already covered the story in detail, so I won't belabor it here, but this promises to be an impressive breakthrough for browser performance--and especially for Firefox. As Mike Shaver, Mozilla's interim vice president of engineering and former chief evangelist, declares:

The goal of the TraceMonkey project--which is still in its early stages--is to take JavaScript performance to another level, where instead of competing against other interpreters, we start to compete against native code.

How fast is that? Mozilla shows some early results of its efforts:

TraceMonkey dramatically improves Firefox performance

(Credit: Mozilla)

What will you do with such an impressive boost to JavaScript? I suspect that this will lead to far more applications being written specifically for Firefox. Will this mean that Firefox, not Internet Explorer, will become the new default target development platform for Web developers? Perhaps. If they can squeeze more functionality and performance out of Firefox, that's where their development time is going to be spent.

Today Firefox is still the province of geeks, but its increasing market share among Web developers suggests that it's already overtaking Internet Explorer in developer affections. With an impressive speed boost, it's very likely that this movement away from IE will become a mass exodus.

The next question would be, "What will Firefox do with its market dominance?" Unlike Microsoft, which sat on its hands as soon as IE knocked off Netscape, Mozilla is almost certainly going to keep doing what it has always done: push the envelope of browser development and innovation. That's what happens when you're led by a community, not a monopolist.

I like this new overlord.

[redwall_hp]

I say a large quantity of developers need to just break the web for IE all at once. Stop supporting it altogether, and throw up errors saying that Firefox (or any non-IE browser) is now required to use the site. Imagine in monolithic sites like YouTube, Yahoo, and Google all did that.

[MorningBit]

Yes - and cut their noses despite their faces. Support all browsers - why are FireFox geeks so myopic?

[PACSferret]

There's no need to 'write for FF' as you say, because Mozilla devs have been careful to stick to standards - so any browser that follow the same standards will run the same code. Write for the standards, and everybody's happy. It also means that IE, Safari et al have both the challenge, and importantly the opportunity, to step up to the plate and improve their own codebase.

[richard petty--2008]

I agree 100%: Code to standards -- period.

[rapier1]

The trick is balancing standards against progress - you have to be willing to bend standards in order to push the technology forward. If everyone coded to standards the web would have been significantly retarded in its development. AJAX, for example, was based on an concept that was entirely outside of the standards after all.

[rapier1]

Will developers now develop exclusively on FF? Maybe, who cares as they'll still be developing for the dominant browser and to suggest otherwise is to imply that developers are either independently wealthy or complete idiots. Neither of which is true in most cases. Even if FF does gain market dominance developers will continue to write for IE *because* it will remain a significant market player for some number of years.

[jrepenning]

I think you got your chickens and eggs mixed up: developers may wish they could develop for the coolest platform, but they'll continue to draw their pay for developing for the most common platform.

[richard.watson]

That's different for each segment. My customers are 60%+ Firefox users and it's not a technical application. I'll spend more time making sure FF is working!

[ctkeene]

The most important reason I see our developers using Firefox is debugging - Firebug is so good for Javascript debugging that the only time our developers use IE is for compatibility testing. Thus Firefox is building momentum not just around speed but also around its ecosystem of plugins.

[zer0efx]

Though I find FB superior in debugging for more than just JS, FF is still my default web browser for other reasons. As the web sites we develop become more and more intuitive and interactive, the more we find ourselves writing hack code and conditional statements just for IE6. IE7 thankfully started to become more web compliant, but I still use FF as my development browser. Something myself and other development colleagues like to say is "Develop for FireFox, Fix for IE."

FF :rawk:

[kristianna Thomas]

I like many fortunate, or unfortunate pc'ers have been subjected to the on and off aspects of IE7 with its, have encountered a problem and needs to close syndrome for a long time. It seems that when a giant makes it to the top it becomes lathargic and complacent in its domain, microsoft seems to be the giant that has become lazy on the mountain top. I have become to frustrated with IE7 that I am giving up on it for Firefox, and may never look back. I have IE7 and Firefox with IE7 as my main search engine, but I may install linux and use it as my secondary search engine and dump microsoft all together; or keep it as; the other white meat. Pork and one? Pig ears?

[djc8080]

It's unfortunate that web 2.0 developers are restricted to the 'lowest-common-denominator' among browsers. It's encouraging to see FIrefox and Safari innovate to push the stagnant Microsoft team.

To be fair, Microsoft led with rich, though non-standard, Javascript methods. IE7 did little to expand services - similar to Vista over XP. It's time for Microsoft to wake up and compete with code, not Balmer-speak.