Firefox Javascript Performance To Get A Shot In The Arm

Category: Software
Posted: August 22, 2008 04:30PM
Author: jammin

If you are anything like me, then websites which make heavy use of Javascript may get slightly frustrating at times, slowing down pages that would otherwise be responsive. The good news is that Mozilla has been working on some new optimization to greatly increase the performance of Firefox's Javascript engine. The optimization tactic called 'tracing' has seen performance increases of between 20 and 40 fold in some cases, and believe the work being put down will pave the way for developers to use Javascript for writing full applications. It should also increase Firefox performance in general, as a number of components and extensions are coded in Javascript. The code should see inclusion in the next update to Firefox (3.1), and it is worth noting that Apple have also been implementing performance improvements, which are due to find their way into Safari 4.