Warp aims to improve the Firefox JavaScript performance by reducing the amount of internal type information that is tracked along with other optimizations. Warp can lead to greater responsiveness and faster page load speed. Numbers cited by Warm developers are normally in the 5~15% range.
As of yesterday, Firefox Nightly now enables Warp by default. The enabling in Firefox Nightly is seeing 20% faster load times for Win64 Google Docs, 13% faster for the Android Reddit SpeedIndex, 18% faster for PDFPaint, and other measurable improvements elsewhere.
That’s a big improvement, and sadly, due to the state of the modern web, a very, very welcome one.
Impressive, but how does that compare to chrome?
Less memory hog.
I have been saying it since the crusade against Flash started: The main reason Google didn’t like SWF wasn’t the fact Adobe’s implementation of Flash player for Android sucked, but because SWF ads had to contain themselves to a single DOM node. Google is an ad company, not a tech company. When they said “Javascript offers better experiences”, they meant the ability of advertisers to spread their ads all over the webpage DOM in all kinds of “imaginative” ways, not anything related to performance.
The modern web is a Javascript runtime. I will miss you pure HTML with your beautiful DOM tree…
I always thought that Apple didn’t like Flash because could bypass the appstore.
So can HTML5.
Apple didn’t like Flash because they ‘d have to restrict development of their browser (they ‘d have to define an API similar to NPAPI and stick to it) and because quite frankly any non-Windows implementations of Flash sucked. Apple wanted to fully control the browser implementation in iOS, so they can make it as good as possible (which in all fairness they achieved to a great degree), and a badly implemented add-on was not conducive towards that goal.
This doesn’t mean the concept behind SWF wasn’t worthwhile.
kurkosdr,
I agree with jgfenix that the primary reason apple did it was to block all competing browser technologies, emulators, etc. The decisions of what to allow was based on business and politics rather than technology. Apple was already set on blocking competing technologies one way or another, the only question was what excuses it would use for doing so.
Mind you, I’ve never been a fan of multimedia heavy flash interfaces, but in many ways I think adobe was used as a scapegoat for what was in actuality poor & bloated practices on the part of the web design industry. Many of these practices still plague us, it just happens to be implemented in HTML5 now.
One that drives me nuts is auto-downloading & auto-playing media, I hate it with a passion and at least with firefox I’ve never found a way to 100% disabled it. Over the years I’ve tried a lot of suggestions, but a lot of sites are able to bypass it. Love it or hate it, at least when it came to flash this wasn’t a problem because it was easy to block. These days it’s so much harder to block unwanted elements under HTML5.