Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Firefox 18 Beta Out With IonMonkey JavaScript Engine

Posted by Unknown on from the up-to-11 dept.

An anonymous reader writes with a quick bite from The Next Web about the latest Firefox beta, this time featuring some under-the-hood improvements: "Mozilla on Monday announced the release of Firefox 18 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can download it now from Mozilla.org/Firefox/Beta. The biggest addition in this update is significant JavaScript improvements, courtesy of Mozilla's new JavaScript JIT compiler called IonMonkey. The company promises the performance bump should be noticeable whenever Firefox is displaying Web apps, games, and other JavaScript-heavy pages."

2 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. IonMonkey, JagerMonkey, TraceMonkey, SpiderMonkey by file_reaper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I haven't kept track with the JIT's that have been in Firefox. I recall the days when TraceMonkey and JagerMonkey were added to boost performance. Could somebody recap or tell why Firefox is abandoning the older versions or redoing them? I'm truly curious as to what they learned, what worked and what didn't work. Are they finding new usage patterns that warrant a new JIT design? Thanks.

  2. Re:So far by wvmarle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Slashdot is a prime example of a site heavily using javascript.

    Ubuntu 10.04 LTS stuck to Firefox 3.6 for a long time. When loading a /. page, particularly one with many comments, it often gave me the "script is taking too long to complete" warning message. It would eventually complete, but took long. When Ubuntu finally replaced the browser with a newer Firefox, that problem was solved. It now renders reasonably fast.

    And considering I have ads disabled, it is really /. itself that's so demanding.