Developers want TraceMonkey off Firefox's back

 

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Posted on 24 Feb 2009 at 09:16

Mozilla developers are beginning to question the value of the TraceMonkey rendering engine, as its bugs continue to delay the release date of Firefox 3.1.

The calls come after Mozilla's head of engineering, Mike Shaver, acknowledged that the browser was unlikely to hit its scheduled first quarter release date due to a number of persistent bugs, most notably in the TraceMonkey rendering engine.

TraceMonkey is intended to speed up Javascript performance by around three times and is the headline feature of Firefox 3.1, however not everybody is content to wait around for the star of the show to settle down.

"Without TraceMonkey, we probably could have shipped 3.1 final by now, or, if not now, within the next month," says Firefox developer David Baron in a message posted on the Mozilla forum. "I think there should be a limit to the amount we're willing to slip 3.1 to accommodate TraceMonkey, and I think we should decide what that limit is."

The view was backed by fellow developer Graydon Hoare who notes: "I have to concur here. TraceMonkey is really cool tech, and a remarkably quick initial development, but it's not the whole enchilada of the browser."

Hoare suggested disabling TraceMonkey by default, allowing experienced users to enable it if they wanted, and allowing the release of Firefox 3.1.

It was a suggestion Shaver dismissed: "We're always looking at all of our choices, but I don't think it's likely," he tells Computerworld. "TraceMonkey is a big part of Firefox 3.1, and a big part of what we want to have for users."

"We're taking the time to get this worked out. No one will remember when Firefox 3.1 shipped other than the guy who writes the Wikipedia entry. But people will remember how Firefox 3.1 runs."

Mozilla is already thinking about what to stuff into Firefox 3.2, with Ubiquity integration likely to be the pick of the new features, Firefox architect Mike Connor told us in an exclusive interview.

Author: Stuart Turton