Firefox 3.1 poised to be twice as fast as Firefox 3.0 news
27 August 2008

The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser has already carved a niche for itself in the competitive world of Web surfing. In its Version 3.0 avatar, it entered the record books as the most downloaded software within a period of 24 hours by notching up 8 million downloads on the first day of its launch.

Now, Mozilla aims to make the popular product faster to turn it into the default application for most of the Internet users, even those who swear by Internet Explorer. (See: Internet Explorer rival Firefox 3.0 creates download record, but reveals flaws)

Mozilla is accelerating JavaScript functions in pre-release versions of Firefox 3.1. Using the TraceMonkey just-in-time compiler the execution time for some functions is reduced to as little as five per cent of previous version's execution time.

The TraceMonkey project is still in its nascent stage, and is said to improve the operating speed, by redefining the JavaScript performance of the application, by fetching the native code speed to JavaScript.

Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering have stated that the new application would double the speed of the browser, and thereby tendering a swift browsing experience to its users, further, it would extend the capabilities of JavaScript to image editing and 3D graphics.

In their blog, developers Andreas Gal and Michael Franz explain how the tracing mechanism in TraceMonkey works. One of the main tricks performed by TraceMonkey is that, where branching occurs, it generates not only the required code, but also considers and compiles the other branches and saves the code for subsequent use. The just-in-time compiler can generate code for x86 and ARM systems, which should also be a boost for the in-development Mobile Firefox.

Because Firefox implements many internal functions using JavaScript, the acceleration should a general effect on Firefox's operation speed, beyond just speeding up web page Javascript.

Firefox 3.1 is scheduled for release at the end of this year. The new acceleration technology is currently disabled in the pre-release version and users will need to activate it manually.


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Firefox 3.1 poised to be twice as fast as Firefox 3.0