The idea was for Tamarin to be as fast as V8 on untyped JS, and (via the Flash vector) distributed and integrated with all IE versions via the COM ActiveScripting interfaces to the native DOM and browser objects.
This was harder than it sounds. Tamarin was not fast on untyped code and the work to make it so never happened. We at Mozilla paid Mark Hammond to do the COM integration with IE, but he ran into global object API mismatches and couldn't make progress without help from Adobe. ES4 failed and Adobe departed.
ChromeFrame is really a super-ScreamingMonkey, but will it get distribution on the scale that Flash has? If it did, I bet authors would target it. With IE9 there's less need for it, but IE8 on Windows XP seems likely to be the "new IE6".
I suspect something different will happen from the best laid plans of Alex et al. for ChromeFrame, just as our ScreamingMonkey dreams died. Either Microsoft will manage to move people off of XP, or other browsers will convert most XP users to switch from IE8, or something I can't foresee, but not ChromeFrame ubiquity, will happen.
http://brendaneich.com/2007/07/new-projects/
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:ScreamingMonkey
The idea was for Tamarin to be as fast as V8 on untyped JS, and (via the Flash vector) distributed and integrated with all IE versions via the COM ActiveScripting interfaces to the native DOM and browser objects.
This was harder than it sounds. Tamarin was not fast on untyped code and the work to make it so never happened. We at Mozilla paid Mark Hammond to do the COM integration with IE, but he ran into global object API mismatches and couldn't make progress without help from Adobe. ES4 failed and Adobe departed.
ChromeFrame is really a super-ScreamingMonkey, but will it get distribution on the scale that Flash has? If it did, I bet authors would target it. With IE9 there's less need for it, but IE8 on Windows XP seems likely to be the "new IE6".
I suspect something different will happen from the best laid plans of Alex et al. for ChromeFrame, just as our ScreamingMonkey dreams died. Either Microsoft will manage to move people off of XP, or other browsers will convert most XP users to switch from IE8, or something I can't foresee, but not ChromeFrame ubiquity, will happen.