Power of Thought

Most of today’s web sites and web applications are built using the JavaScript scripting language. Some may say that a trend towards the fine-tuning of JavaScript interpreters in modern browsers was just a matter of time since any such optimization translates into performance gains. Mozilla recently launched the browser speed race with Firefox 3, which delivers more speed than any other previous Firefox version. Apple answered with Safari 4, claiming the browser’s JavaScript engine has been accelerated by 53%. Welcome to the browser speed race.

Safari 4 has just been seeded to the developers at Apple’s developer conference. The manufacturer claims that the software has a 53% faster JavaScript engine than the preceding and current version 3.1 (based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test conducted on iMac with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at 2.8 GHz, with 2 GB of RAM and running under Mac OS X Snow Leopard.) Although Firefox 3 RC3 was the first to deliver significant JavaScript performance improvement, Apple apparently is exceeding those gains with Safari 4.

Apple uses a new and improved JavaScript interpreter code-named SquirrelFish, which is provided on an open-source basis from the WebKit project, the same organization that makes the open-source engine used by Safari to render web pages. According to the WebKit project, the SquirrelFish engine is 1.6 times faster than the JavaScript engine in Safari 3.1.

SquirrelFish does its magic by turning JavaScript script into so-called bytecodes, an optimized code much more suitable for run-time execution than natural language-based JavaScript commands, which are longer and more complicated to interpret – and therefore are slower.

Why JavaScript performance matters
Most today’s web applications and web 2.0 sites rely on the JavaScript scripting language originally created by current Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich while he was employed by Netscape. JavaScript acts as glue that connects a user interface rendered in a web browser with a database and programming logic running in a web server. The browser’s JavaScript engine is solely responsible for interpreting and executing JavaScript commands embedded in HTML code. As a result, a browser’s JavaScript engine performance is directly related to the performance and responsiveness of a web application, contributing to an improved user experience.

The fact that many applications grow in size and become more bloated with each release means that a browser that can run web applications faster and make user interfaces more responsive on any computer is actually a big deal. You don’t have to have any specific market forecasting talent to predict that this trend may be impacting browser market shares: Speed can directly translate into more usability for most of us. Clearly, JavaScript handling is on its way to become a powerful weapon in the browser market.

SpiderMonkey, SquirrelFish, Tamarin and more
Mozilla was the first to introduce significant speed gains with Firefox 3 beta 5 (the final version is expected to ship by mid-June). Firefox has its Gecko engine to render web pages, which is generally considered to be slightly slower than Safari’s WebKit – which is largely responsible for the “fastest browser in the world” status Safari enjoys. Firefox’ JavaScript implementation is based on Mozilla’s own and decade old SpiderMonkey technology, which many considered to be the fastest JavaScript interpreter until SquirrelFish came out.

Although in beta, Firefox 3 scored with many reviewers who are praising the browser’s performance improvements, with WSJ’s Walt Mossberg declaring the browser a “winner.” But now that the SquirrelFish/Safari combination appears to be offsetting the speed gains in Firefox 3 and may set a new benchmark, we can expect more direct competition between Mozilla and Apple. Mozilla has plans to expand SpiderMonkey with Adobe’s JavaScript engine called Tamarin, included in Flash 9, which has a so-called “tracing” feature designed to enable faster code execution. However, the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark claims that SquirrelFish is at least 1.9 times faster than Tamarin.

Mozilla plans to wedge Tamarin into Firefox and match the API’s of both technologies “There are areas in which SpiderMonkey is faster than Tamarin and areas where it’s not. We’re looking to build hybrids that are best-of-breed for both worlds and we’re going to pull those into the Firefox release when ready,” Mozilla co-founder Mike Shaver recently said.

Can IE8 compete?
The big variable in this game is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, currently in beta 1 phase. IE8 is expected to deliver speed gains in JavaScript performance as well. However, Microsoft is facing a tough task. The fact that the software giant is often criticized for delivering bloated and inefficient software certainly doesn’t help. In our tests, the first beta of IE8 shows no noticeable speed gains in running web applications.

Quite the opposite is the case, actually. Websites and web applications run noticeably slower than in IE7. The whole browsing experience generally appears to be less responsive. Of course, IE8 is in an early development stage and you can bet Microsoft is going to tweak its performance. The only problem is that the software giant will have to work to raise the stakes in the browser race. If IE8 under-delivers, the market could respond with further market share erosion for IE. It is evident now that JavaScript engine performance has become a key metric in the newest race for the title of fastest browser.

The battle ahead is nicely summed by Mozilla co-founder Mike Shaver who said the following: “They [Apple] have dropped SquirrelFish in now and got a big speed up there. We’ve got more coming on our side. You’ll see this leapfrog pattern over and over. We’re not going to let anybody slack on that and the other browser vendors need to keep up, too.”

According to Net Applications, Firefox 3 captured almost one fifth (18.41%) of the browser market in May, followed by Safari 3.1 which hit 6.25%. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer continues on its pace of a slow but steady decline, ending up at 73.75% in May. Microsoft has scheduled second beta of IE8 for an August release, with a generally expected final release in the fourth quarter of this year.

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“Hold the line!” That’s the new rallying cry for the core Windows development team. Add new features. Tweak existing ones. But whatever you do, don’t make Windows 7 any slower or fatter than Vista.

I have little doubt those are the marching orders for Windows 7, given the tight release timeframe of 18 to 24 months plus various reports of early Milestone builds. More ambitious changes would risk another — and potentially fatal — Longhorn-style delay. Windows 7 will be exactly what the internal Microsoft working title conveys: the seventh (actually fifth) generation of the Windows NT code base — the same code base that forms the basis of Windows XP and Vista today.

Shocking? Only if you’re one of the deluded Save XP die-hards who bought into the whole Windows 7 uber alles mystique. For these lost souls, the next Windows is more than just another version. It’s a true panacea, a conduit through which they can pour all of their anti-Vista angst. Don’t like UAC? Windows 7 will fix that. Frustrated by Vista’s sluggish performance? Windows 7 will run circles around it.

Reality check: Windows 7 will be a lot like Vista. In fact, it’ll be more like an extensive Service Pack (think Windows XP SP2 and/or the various NT Option Packs of yore) than a major new release. Big ideas and big new features are what got Microsoft into the whole “Longhorn reset” mess in the first place.

This is actually a good thing. Despite the criticisms leveled against it (including more than one heated diatribe by yours truly), Vista isn’t really flawed in any fundamental way. Yes, it’s slower than XP — but that was to be expected given its more complex code paths. Likewise, the “girth” issues were somewhat inevitable. Meanwhile, the hardware base is slowly catching up to where it needs to be to support a more complex Windows OS.

I’d even go so far as to say that, if Vista were launched today –- with the SP1 tweaks and improved device driver ecosystem in place -– it would fare a lot better than it did. But hindsight is 20/20. The future, in the form of Windows 7, is all about shipping an incremental follow-on to Vista that shores up the NT code base once and for all.

The good news is that this also makes speculating about the next version’s runtime behavior a lot easier. After all, if Windows 7 is just Windows Vista with some performance and usability tweaks, it means we can deduce a lot about the product’s system requirements and compatibility with the installed base by examining performance and usage data collected from systems running its immediate predecessors, Windows “5″ (also known as XP) and “6″ (also known as Vista).

Peering into the future with Windows Sentinel
Enter the Windows Sentinel project. With nearly 2,000 contributing systems, the exo.repository –- which is the heart of Windows Sentinel –- provides us with a representative sample of Windows-based systems running a mixture of versions (XP, 2003, 2008, Vista) and workloads (business productivity, analytics, home/personal).

Basically, we have our finger on the pulse of the Windows landscape. And by measuring that pulse, plus a few other metrics (and some educated guessing), we can tell a lot about how Windows 7 will be received when it ships.

For example, we can tell right now that roughly 29 percent of current systems will be able to run Windows 7, although not always with adequate performance.

This conclusion is based on an analysis of system disclosure data (CPU type/count/speed, memory size) as well as performance indices calculated from runtime data collected over a one-month period. Of the remaining systems, 60 percent have too little memory (less than 2GB) to reasonably host a Vista successor, while 29 percent don’t have the CPU horsepower (less than 2GHz).

We can further break down the “survivors” by analyzing their current workloads. A full 36 percent of them are already CPU bound, with 27 percent of them heavily overloaded. This is per the exo.repository’s Peak CPU Saturation Index, which is a compound index derived from 4 contributing factors: Processor Queue Length; Per-process Instant Delay (a custom CPU metric derived from the Processor Queue value); Per-Process Cumulative Delay (another custom metric); and Event Duration.

Interestingly, of the systems that are most heavily burdened, only 31 percent are running Vista (which is not really surprising since Vista makes up just 16 percent of the overall sample set). The rest are running a mixture of XP and Server 2003/XP-64-bit.

Needless to say, a heavily loaded (in terms of CPU saturation) XP box doesn’t bode well for Vista’s successor. Like Vista, Windows 7 will introduce a much higher CPU burden in the form of additional background services and their corresponding execution threads. Currently, this ratio runs approximately two to one in favor of Vista: A Vista-based PC must juggle roughly twice as many concurrent execution threads as an XP PC while running the identical office productivity workload.

Chances are good that Windows 7 will, at minimum, maintain the status quo in terms of resource requirements. This, in turn, means that customers who were hoping for some relief with Windows 7 will be sorely disappointed. It’s simply not realistic to expect Microsoft to produce a “leaner” OS and yet still add enough functionality to make it worth upgrading. At best, we might see a new version with a resource footprint similar to Windows Vista, which still places it out of reach of more than three-quarters of the systems in our sample set.

Bottom line: Less than 20 percent of the installed base is ready to migrate to Windows 7 today based on all of the factors detailed above. By far, the biggest (60 percent of the base) inhibitor is limited RAM: Like Vista, Windows 7 will have a voracious appetite for memory. Today, 2GB is the bare minimum for reasonable Vista performance. Expect 4GB to be the norm by the time Windows 7 ships. Likewise, the days of the single-core CPU are over. Dual cores are a must, while quad cores are rapidly transitioning from luxury to mainstream necessity.

Fortunately for Microsoft, it has time –- and Moore’s indefatigable Law –- on its side. Assuming Microsoft does indeed “hold the line” on code path expansion and keep Windows 7’s requirements within striking distance of Windows Vista, it can launch virtually anything and still have a winner. Just don’t expect to boot it on that old Pentium III box you stumbled across in your basement.

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Microsoft showed off two social-networking projects at TechFest on Tuesday that show that the company wants to do more in this area than just invest in Facebook.

One project, known as Salsa, aims to use one’s corporate data to piece together their social network, or at least their network of co-workers. In its current form, the software is a plug-in to Outlook that shows social-networking information such as a photo and profile next to an incoming e-mail message. The program also pieces together a list of “friends” based on e-mail frequency and other data.

“When you start looking there is a surprising amount of information that gets locked in e-mail,” said Shane Williams, one of the Microsoft Research team that worked on Salsa.

Lili Cheng, the Microsoft veteran who heads the social-computing team at Microsoft Research, said that part of the power of Salsa is simply putting a human face on e-mail. She said her own use of the site has borne out the power of that, noting it is harder to argue with a colleague when she sees a picture of them with their cute kid or pet.

“E-mail can be very dehumanizing,” Cheng said.

Cheng said that in addition to deploying it inside Microsoft, she’d like to see how Salsa works within one or two other large companies to see if it is more broadly useful.

In another project from Cheng’s group, known as C2, Microsoft researchers have created a Windows application that pieces together contact data from a variety of social-networking sites. For the purposes of Tuesday’s demonstration, the researchers focused on Windows Live Spaces and Facebook. Researcher Steve Ickman said he chose those two because they represent among the most open (Spaces) and closed (Facebook) when it comes to data sharing.

Although Facebook is notoriously restrictive when it comes to members scraping their data, Ickman said that he believes he was able to stay within Facebook’s terms of service by grabbing only approved data from one’s own contacts and not caching the information long-term. “It’s totally legal, at least at this point.”

The project is more of a technology demonstration than anything geared toward a specific product, Ickman said, adding that he hoped it would demonstrate to the product teams that they can be more ambitious. “We tend to cancel things because they are too hard,” he said.

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With all eyes on what Microsoft is doing in the online-advertising space, it’s easy to give short shrift to the datacenter and back-end infrastructure that is powering not just adCenter, but all of Microsoft’s various Live services.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reminded Wall Street analysts earlier this week that the cloud infrastructure is key to how Microsoft goes forward with Software+Services (S+S). During his February 4 Strategic Update in New York, Ballmer told analysts:

“And a lot of the things that we have been investing in, in terms of cloud platform, which themselves have no direct business model but come to market as servers, as desktops, et cetera, it will require reasonably significant investments to start commercializing that cloud platform….
“What’s the future of Windows, what’s the future of corporate desktop value? Each and every one of these businesses, on top of a consistent cloud platform, transitions to have additional revenue and profit opportunities, based upon this transformation to the cloud.”

There are lots of components beyond just the racks of Windows Server boxes that are keeping Microsoft’s online properties up and running. Some of the other pieces that have come across my radar screen (thanks to tips from various sources who requested anonymity):

* AutoPilot: The management system for Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger and Live Search services. Word is Microsoft is extending AutoPilot to handle every Windows Live service, as well as some other members of its Live and Online families. AutoPilot performs tasks like network monitoring, power monitoring, performance monitoring, analysis, etc. It also will enable Microsoft to use commodity hardware in deploying its datacenter infrastructure.

* Bedrock: The core shared publishing platform for Live

* Shuttle: The feed-management system for Live. I’m not sure how this fits (or doesn’t) with Microsoft’s FeedSync, which is one of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s pet projects.

* Fuse: A SQL Server diagnostics/monitoring system

* Cloud DB: The project via which Microsoft is scaling out its back-end structured data store. Cloud DB will be the storage platform for many of the Windows Live services and applications. The team is working to make SQL Server more fault tolerant, scalable and highly available.

Microsoft officials have been playing up their desire to combine their datacenter assets with those from Yahoo in order to maximize network effects as one of the primary rationales for Microsoft’s proposed Yahoo takeover. As others have pointed out, Yahoo’s back-end infrastructure — which is as involved and complex as Microsoft’s, no doubt — is powered heavily by Linux and other open-source software.

Sounds like a daunting task to combine the two. Maybe Microsoft should just let Yahoo’s datacenters run Linux and use that as another way to study its competition…

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Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn (£22.4bn) in cash and shares.

The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo’s board, is 62% above Yahoo’s closing share price on Thursday.

Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional $300m this year trying to revive the company.

It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft.

“We have great respect for Yahoo, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said.

Chairman quit
There has not yet been any comment from Yahoo.

Its chief executive, Jerry Yang, announced on Tuesday that he intended to lay off 1,000 staff as part of a restructuring plan.

Terry Semel, who stepped down as chief executive last June, also quit as non-executive chairman on Thursday.

Microsoft said that Yahoo shareholders could choose to receive either cash or shares.

Yahoo shares have fallen 46% since reaching a year-high of $34.08 in October. They rose 54% in pre-market trading.

“Ultimately this corporate marriage was forced by the rise of Google, which has grown into a serious competitor for both Microsoft as a software company and Yahoo as an internet portal,” said Tim Weber, business editor of the BBC News website.

“It is a shotgun marriage, but the person holding the shotgun is Google.”

‘Exorbitant premium’
According to its letter to Yahoo, Microsoft attempted to enter talks about a deal a year ago, but was rebuffed because Yahoo was confident about the “potential upside” presented by the reorganisation and operational activities that were being put in place at the time.

“A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved,” Microsoft’s letter said.

But there has been some concern about the price that Microsoft is offering.

“To me, the premium seems exorbitant, for what is a dwindling business,” said Tim Smalls from the brokerage firm Execution LLC.

“I personally don’t see how the synergies of Microsoft-Yahoo is going to take on Google.”

Other analysts were more enthusiastic about the offer.

“It is a fantastic offer. It is game on,” said Colin Gillis from Canaccord Adams.

“This consolidates the marketplace down to Google versus Microsoft. These two companies will be going head to head.”

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