Firefox 3.1 will be upto 7x Faster than Firefox 3.0
Mozilla Firefox 3.1, codenamed Shiretoko is an upcoming revision for Firefox 3.0. Shiretoko will bring a lot of speed improvement compared to its precursor within certain scenarios. This improvement is largely contributed by optimizations to Firefox’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. Mozilla developers have been working hard to bring a Trace-tree based Just-in-time compiler to SpiderMonkey. Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering at Mozilla Corp, point out that on certain test it runs about 7x faster using the JIT than Firefox 3. So 2-4x average JavaScript speed improvement is expected.
“A fantastic new improvement to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey) has landed. Code-named TraceMonkey this engine utilizes a technique, called trace trees, which adds just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey. A major goal of the project has been to set JavaScript up to compete with natively-compiled code, rather than simply against other interpreters. This means that we’re starting to see speeds that are completely out of this league when it comes to performance.”
~~ John Resig, a JavaScript Evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation.
Another improvement also comes from a new support of querySelector[All], which can speed up CSS selector processing. Some tests on slickspeed selectors from the Mootools project shows an impressive ~3-7x speedup.
For those who cannot wait to try out these improvement can download Firefox 3.1 Shiretoko Alpha 1 here.
Please be aware that Shiretoko Alpha 1 is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community.
