Tracemonkey is a new addition to Firefox and it'll be in 3.5. What it does is compile Javascript into machine code, which speeds up Javascript remarkably. Now I recently tried Safari 4 and was blown away by how fast it was in the Javascript department. Well head over to http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/tracemonkey-demo/ and test the image rendering demo in Safari 4 compared to the current Firefox(3) and the video demo of the latest Firefox(3.5) soon to be released.

Firefox 3: ~1.2 seconds

Safari 4: ~0.3 seconds

Firefox 3.5: ~0.1 seconds

Up till now Adobe flash was faster than Javascript in the browser because Flash/Actionscript is compiled into bytecode. Bytecode is fast and is run in the flash virtual machine. Mozilla and Adobe have been collaborating on a project called Tamarin, and working toward the next version of Ecmascript, the standard both Actionscript and Javascript implement, one of the products of that collaboration aside from both technologies being able to compile into machine code(a language-set interpreted natively by the hardware) is Tracemonkey.

The good news is because All the major players are contributing to Tamarin and because it's gonna be open source. All major browsers will have it implemented in the near future. It also means that Flex/AIR apps will run faster, and that all the major players including Microsoft(what!?  :D) are intending to implement open standards. One step closer to a MUCH faster web, where you choose a browser based on features, and not whether or not your favourite site is broken in the others. Which will mean much more innovation in browser features and possibly spawning off into browser only OSs. Then again maybe it'll stop somewhere around Jolicloud http://www.jolicloud.com/

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 1:39 am and is filed under Software, The Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.