Best of 2011

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2011. 136 posts.

Web & Frontend
107

What's new in Firefox 7

v.7.0, offered to release channel users on September 27th, 2011 Check out what’s new, the known issues and frequently asked questions about the latest released version of Firefox. As always, you’re encouraged to tell us what you think , or file a bug in Bugzilla .

111

Faster JavaScript parsing

Over the past year or so I’ve almost doubled the speed of SpiderMonkey’s JavaScript parser. I did this by speeding up both the scanner ( bug 564369 , bug 584595 , bug 588648 , bug 639420 , bug 645598 ) and the parser ( bug 637549 ). I used patch stacks in several of those bugs, and so in those six bugs I actually…

114

SpiderMonkey is on a diet

One thing I’ve learnt while working for Mozilla is that a web browser can be characterized as a JavaScript execution environment that happens to have some multimedia capabilities. In particular, if you look at Firefox’s about:memory page, the JS engine is very often the component responsible for consuming the most…