Posted 07/01/09 at 12:45:58 PM by David Murphy

Happy day-after-Firefox-release day.  If you're one of the 3.2 million Americans to download the latest release of the browser as of this column's writing, congratulations.  You, like your peers, have recognized the value of upgrading to faster and better technology products!  If that sounds weird, that's the point.  It should.  According to Net Applications, around twenty percent of users (out of a survey sample of around 160 million people) still use an older version of a Web browser, be it Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 2, or either Safari 3.1 or 3.2.  You are not among them; I salute thee.

You've probably read a lot of marketing in the last 24 hours about how fast, awesome, and packed-full of features the new Firefox 3.5 release is.  Since you've had a chance to play with the release candidate of this latest upgrade starting in early June, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise.  But let's cut through the press release and examine the real facts: Just how much faster is Firefox 3.5 over its browser brethren?  Has Mozilla's newest TraceMonkey JavaScript engine delivered a princess or a barrel?

Click the jump to access the contents of this article 35 percent faster.

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Posted 08/26/08 at 08:27:34 AM by Mark Edward Soper

In Firefox 3, JavaScript execution is already 20% faster than in Firefox 2. That's great, but it's minimal compared to the speedups coming in future Firefox versions, thanks to a new JavaScript rendering engine called TraceMonkey now in development at Mozilla (Firefox 3's JavaScript rendering engine is known as SpiderMonkey).

Techspot.com reports that the new TraceMonkey JavaScript execution engine coming in future versions of Firefox will provide at least a 2x performance increase over SpiderMonkey, based on information posted by Mozilla's Mike Shaver (its VP of Engineering).  However, that might be a conservative estimate. Shaver reports that TraceMonkey runs core JavaScript primitives such as function call, global loop, and empty loop at at speeds over 20 times faster than in Firefox 3. Benchmark performance (see figure accompanying this article) is just as impressive. According to Shaver:

The goal of the TraceMonkey project — which is still in its early stages — is to take JavaScript performance to another level, where instead of competing against other interpreters, we start to compete against native code.

So, how long before TraceMonkey elbows SpiderMonkey out of the way as "top monkey" in the Firefox JavaScript execution game? A stripped-down version of TraceMonkey is now being incorporated into Firefox 3.1 (it's turned off by default in current builds), but the full version of TraceMonkey won't see the light of day until version 4.0, according to Techspot.com.

Hit the jump for your chance to comment on what you think faster JavaScript execution will mean for you.

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