A Revolution in Web Browsing: The New Firefox 3.1b1 Already Beats All Speed Records
The latest beta1 release of Mozilla Firefox 3.1 shows major improvements of benchmarking tests times, the browser being much faster as compared with previous versions and other existing browsers. It includes TraceMonkey, an improvement of SpiderMonkey, Gecko’s JavaScript engine written in C.
TraceMonkey is a Just In Time (JIT) JavaScript compiler that adds native code compilation to the Gecko’s JavaScript engine. The benchmarking tests times depends in a great measure of the type of benchmark.
For example, the average score for SunSpider benchmark shows the fact that TraceMonkey determines an improvement of the web browser speed by making it almost two times (1.83) faster than Firefox 3.0.1, while an image manipulation test demonstrates an increase of the speed over six times when the JIT compiler is enabled. According to Brendan Eich, TraceMonkey having support for x86, x86-64, and ARM can be included both in mobile and desktop platforms.
The outstanding speed performances due to JIT native code compilation in the web browser JavaScript engine could eliminate the usage of proprietary plugins by porting certain code to JavaScript. By default, the TraceMonkey JIT compiler is off, but in the final version of Mozilla Firefox 3.1 web browser planned to be released until the end of the year 2008, it will be on.
In order to test the new performances of the latest beta release of Mozilla Firefox 3.1 web browser, the user must enable TraceMonkey by using the hidden browser preferences: in a new tab the about:config page must be opened and with the help of the filter javascript.option.jit.content should be found. Then the value of the javascript.option.jit.content must be set to true.
Due to the fact, Firefox 3.1 is still in beta, various errors could be experienced with TraceMokey JIT compiler enabled, such as “Warning:Unresponsive Script”. In this case, the user should stop the script and disable TraceMokey to view the final result of script action.
The general trend in the future could be the improvement of the just in time native code compilation technique due to the promising performances of browsing activities as well as overall behavior of the Mozilla Firefox application whose core is mainly based on JavaScript code. The latest Mozilla Firefox stable version is available for free download here.
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