Mozilla Unleashes TraceMonkey For Firefox

In a move to make Firefox more competitive with desktop applications and proprietary graphics technology like Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash, Mozilla on Friday released TraceMonkey, a project that adds native code compilation to SpiderMonkey, Mozilla’s JavaScript engine.
Mozilla has included TraceMonkey in an alpha version of Firefox 3.1, the next major release of the open source Firefox Web browser. TraceMonkey is off by default, because it’s not entirely bug-free. But when it’s more stable and enabled, Firefox’s JavaScript should get faster “by an order of magnitude or more,” as Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich put it in a blog post.



