#6 - Same scripting engine in Firefox and Flash?
Do you think that having the same scripting engine in Firefox and flash will be beneficial or another instance of getting tied to a particular vendor?
Eric Smith - Mind Architecture - I like the idea of integrating Javascript/ECMAScript more tightly with ActionScript from a programming point of view. The fewer “mostly the same but different in important ways” languages out there the better.
As for the potential of being tied to a specific vendor, I haven’t seen anything that would make me think Mozilla or Adobe want to make this proprietary to Firefox. But, with Adobe dominating the website editor market and Firefox adoption growing, whatever they hammer out could easily become the de-facto standard.
As long as what they produce is in line with existing open standards that other browser makers can and should abide by, there shouldn’t be a problem but they’re certainly in a position to much up the works should they want to…
Christopher Lee - Mentavius - Well, since Tamarin is open-sourced using the Mozilla tri-license, I don’t think it locks anything or anybody in. From some quick reads, what Adobe really brings to the table is its Just-In Time (JIT) compiler, which should increase the performance of JavaScript-intense apps. It looks like Tamarin has the ability to convert byte code to machine instructions, whereas the current version (SpiderMonkey) just converts to bytecode. Also, from what I’ve been reading, this will be integrated enough (inside SpiderMonkey) that XUL applications will also be compiled through the Tamarin engine, and speed up performance for those building XUL applications on top of FireFox.
I had to do some light reading, because I was out of the loop for the announcement. Of course, that’s no surprise (hehe):
I do think it is a benefit, if for nothing more than the speed that it will bring to the browser.