Supposedly, Kraken has more long-running, sophisticated algorithms (like 'gaussian blur') that are kinder to TraceMonkey's tracing JIT than V8's traditional JIT; if V8 now has a tracing JIT (or something that works much along the same principles, it could be that Kraken becomes a two-horse race.
You gotta love competition between competent and confident engineers. Instead of criticizing and denigrating the competition's accomplishments Mandelin congratulates and analyzes the V8 team's successes.
I remember when Chrome came out, their team said that they weren't trying to mess with Firefox, and that hopefully by keeping Chromium open source, they would enter a mutually beneficial race to create the best possible browser.
I'm glad to see that both Mozilla and the Chrome team are talented and mature enough to accomplish that together.
It doesn't always work out that way. Check out Linus Torvalds' discussion of Subversion or Dan Bernstein's discussion of Postfix, for example. Even though Linus and Dan are competent and confident, they were very harshly critical of their "competition".
Indeed, which is why I was highlighting an example of "doing it right" (aka acting like mature professionals). Even when business issues don't get in the way there's still plenty of room for personal and emotional issues to bring down the level of discourse.
http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.org/index.html
Supposedly, Kraken has more long-running, sophisticated algorithms (like 'gaussian blur') that are kinder to TraceMonkey's tracing JIT than V8's traditional JIT; if V8 now has a tracing JIT (or something that works much along the same principles, it could be that Kraken becomes a two-horse race.