Firefox 3.1: Speeding Up the Web With Supercharged JavaScript

The upcoming release of Firefox 3.1 will make many of your favorite, complex web-apps, like Gmail, run considerably faster thanks to some much improved JavaScript tools in the browser. To help JavaScript along, Mozilla says Firefox 3.1 will give JavaScript a much-needed shot in the arm with its new TraceMonkey JavaScript tool. To demonstrate TraceMonkey's potential, Mozilla's Mike Schroepfer put together demo app and found that even now, with many planned optimizations not yet available, the real world performance is about seven times faster than Firefox 3. For now TraceMonkey is only available via the Firefox nightly builds, but when the first betas of Firefox 3.1 arrive, they'll bring TraceMonkey – and potentially a much faster web – with them.