AWOAFY? (Are We Old And Fast Yet?, or, 9.0.1pre JM+TI available)

During the long death march to Firefox 4, Mozilla made much hay out of their Are We Fast Yet? site, a/k/a AWFY. AWFY was their daily dangling carrot while they worked on the first iteration of methodjit and offered regular feedback against the competition, and is still being used in the new type inference age. Well, JM+TI is here for PowerPC at last (that is, JaegerMonkey and type inference), and so is 9.0.1pre with new backends for your experimental pleasure. There are no other changes in this release and it is otherwise exactly the same as 9.0; it should fix all the known flaws in methodjit. (It does not include the fix Mozilla issued in Firefox 9.0.1 because I have received no relevant reports of crashes related to it, and it may impact performance, so there will not be a 9.0.1 unless I hear differently.)

So, with this release, I am now proud to bring you Are We Old And Fast Yet? where the first answer is yes and the second answer is "not enough." JM+TI now offers JavaScript speeds comparable to our old friend tracejit: on the quad G5, JM+TI (without tracejit) now matches the 1050ms on SunSpider that tracejit gets, and increases Dromaeo to 132 runs/sec. On our testing 1GHz G4/7450, Dromaeo rises to 38 runs/sec, and SunSpider drops slightly to 2750. (We're solving the missing square root problem for the present time by simply falling through to the JavaScript square root library routine. The G5 uses its native square root instruction, of course.)

This is already pretty darn good, but we can do better, and here is our goal for AWOAFY: quad G5 at Highest achieves less than 1000ms on SunSpider; 1GHz G4/7450 achieves less than 2500ms. These are totally doable; in fact, improvements in Firefox due to ship in the Fx11 timeframe may push these numbers down to target without us doing anything, but we're still going to shoot for low-hanging fruit optimizations in TenFourFox 10.

That brings us to what happens next. If Firefox 10 is indeed the ESR, as our Magic 8-ball predicts (it also predicted I would get a date with Scarlett Johansson, though), there are enough pieces of tracejit that it should still work and I think we should stick with tracejit as the default JIT for the duration of the 10 branch if so (with the option for JM+TI baked in for the adventurous): it's well tested, it's safe and it does well on our older hardware. I am waiting for beta 2 to be certified on mozilla-beta and once it is, we will begin the port. On deck for this release are some fixes from Ben and getting Tobias' fixed VMX text conversion routines back in action.

If Firefox 10 is not the ESR, then Fx10 will be the last tracejit release, and people will be forced to use JM+TI starting with Fx11. Sorry, this is Mozilla's call, not mine.

Either way, when we scramble to the ESR, the ESR will become our stable branch. Mozilla will backport security and stability fixes to the ESR which we will pick up, and unlike Mozilla, we will do other kinds of bugfixes to TenFourFox "ESR" that we deem appropriate. There will be no new features added, however. Most users will stay on this release.

For you, the rowdy, wild beta testers, there will still be beta releases, but not formal releases (because there won't be formal releases for awhile -- users will be kept on the ESR-based release). The situation we are trying to avoid is getting stuck on a release of Firefox that isn't getting security updates because we are unable to get the next one working. If, say, we get to Firefox 14 but can't make it to 15 -- and this is a real risk because Mozilla is already making noise about canning 10.5 support somewhere around Fx13, as we have previously discussed -- then we are marooning our users on a branch that will never get any fixes. By keeping later updates merely betas, most users are on a maintained branch and those of us out on the beta channel can just downgrade to the already existing release and live out our days in secure geriatric bliss in feature parity.

Assuming the ESR is 10, the next ESR would be Fx17. If we make it to Fx16, then we will do a regular beta release for Fx16, release Fx16, and go for 17. We can certainly backport security fixes from Fx17 to Fx16 if we fail at Fx17 and stay safe; the code is similar enough. If we don't make it to Fx16, then we can go on to feature parity against the ESR using the patches we've already done for later releases. So I feel pretty good about the future.

JM+TI is only transitional, however, because the future is Mozilla's new IonMonkey engine. This is months away from being functional, but I already looked at some of the code for the existing partially-functional backends and while much of our JM+TI work will transfer, there is a lot of work to do to get it working for PowerPC. Let's try to get as much wear out of the work we've already done.

Now, let's test AWOAFY. Download 9.0.1pre and go to about:config. Turn javascript.options.methodjit.chrome and .content to true, and turn javascript.options.tracejit.chrome and .content to false (yes, you are disabling tracejit; it is not compatible with type inference). Finally, set javascript.options.typeinference to true and restart the browser. Report your results! Remember to turn type inference off if you need to downgrade to 9.0, and turn methodjit off entirely if you downgrade to 9.0b1 or earlier.

• G3
• G4/7400
• G4/7450
• G5