That's a pretty nice improvement for a team that says they're not focused on ACID. And Javascript perf actually appears to have improved. This is going to be some browser battle royale.
No! Not a battle. A culture of rapid development will be set in motion where users learn to expect frequent browser upgrades to get the latest features, but where all browsers support today's suggested minimums out of the box. People already expect to upgrade TV sets every 2-3 years, and mobile handsets every 1.2 years, to get the latest features, why not browsers?
There will be no battle because no single browser has enough market share, both in terms of users and developer loyalty, to create a proprietary technology incompatible with the rest. IE's ActiveX crap is a remnant of an era past, the last vestige of the first dotcom. Since then, the developers have been moving towards the center and adopting standards. Not even ardent FOSS-heads had the stomach to release XUL apps into the wild, even for in-house stuff.
Today it's canvas, audio, video, geolocation, storage, etc. tomorrow you can expect some browser accelerated vector/numeric libraries, microphone support, webcam, phone sync, etc. I am not sure what's gonna drive it, but it could either be a portable hardware device, or a game, something that has to do with "having fun" or "friends", but it will push the browser further into desktop territory. The more resources web apps demand, the more browsers "cheat" and speed things up by bundling native hooks to provide that functionality. After blazing fast javascript, my first bet is on GPU accelerated javascript BLAS.
TV Sets every 2-3 years? Are you serious?
Mobile Phones I'll give you in the 1-2 year range -- but normal people are not upgrading their TV every 3 years.
Who do you think is buying all these varieties of large-screen TV technologies from Plasma, DLP and projection technologies, including their HD variants? It's not just people who kept their old CRTs from the early 90s and waited. Go to Craigslist and you will see people selling TV sets that have HDMI, USB2 and memory slots ..
It's not a battle if they're being dragged into it. Browser vendors are playing catch up with web developers, and they're running out of breath. All it takes is Facebook or Zynga to standardize on, say, Webkit + Unity3D for the rest to lose. That's not a battle, that's running for your life.
There are simply far too many viable options waiting on standby, and eager to step in, for this to be a clash of the titans. The source trees of your average modern browsers are all identical, with the same people working behind the scenes. From a brief experience, I can tell you that Tamarin and Dalvik teams are stealing glances at each other's scantrons ;-)
That's a pretty nice improvement for a team that says they're not focused on ACID. And Javascript perf actually appears to have improved. This is going to be some browser battle royale.