IonMonkey JavaScript Lands in Firefox 18, Speeds Things Up
Mozilla is moving its IonMonkey JIT much faster to Firefox than we anticipated.
The new JavaScript engines just showed up in the first nightly release and could make it into the final version of the browser on January 1, 2013.
IonMonkey will upgrade the current JaegerMonkey, which was introduced with Firefox 4 in March of 2011, and bring Mozilla closer to Google's Crankshaft that is used in Chrome. The progress of IonMonkey can be seen at arewefastyet.com, which shows that, at least on Mozilla's test platform, IonMonkey is faster than Google's Chrome in Mozilla's Kraken benchmark, but still has some catching up to do in Sunspider, and rivals Safari's score in Google V8 benchmark.
Mozilla said that IonMonkey is optimized for long-running applications, while short applications will use the still intact JaegerMonkey. According to Mozilla's David Anderson, IonMonkey introduces loop-invariant code motion, sparse global value numbering, linear scan register allocation, dead code elimination as well as range analysis to the JavaScript engine.
The IonMonkey Firefox can be downloaded from Mozilla's nightly channel now. The Aurora developer version is due on October 9, while the Beta channel is likely to see IonMonkey on November 20, if Mozilla can move IonMonkey through its developer process smoothly.

really? Dang, I am still on '14'
No wonder by girlfriend left me and the dog looks funny at me :-)
It's an agile process. The goal is to produce lots of incremental improvements rapidly for release.
"Well this has the highest version number, so it must have been around the longest, therefore it must be the most evolved and best..."
It's a ridiculous idea, that I'm sure some upper management meddler recommended to "out do the competition". Firefox should be no higher than 4.18 and Chrome being the youngest browser with the highest version number is just plain stupid...
Marketing = Deception = Lies... Just ask the masters of it over at Apple! Don't be fooled by these silly shenanigans...
Fast Forward to the year 2016 where we will have FireFox version 47.2 and Chrome version 62.1...
So annoying and stupid, sad thing is it WILL work on the simpletons...
Ditto that it annoys the hell out of me. However we can all blame google. They went stupid with the chrome versions numbers, and firefox followed suit.
It really is version 4.xx still.
Don't understand why you had a thumbs down count for this !
You are perfectly right about the numbering scheme !
I agree with the numbering scheme; that it bugs the hell out of me!!, changing the whole number should only be for major changes only - this plays havoc for PC Admin's of businesses that use Firefox across 100's or 1000's of PC's , cant remember the exact reason why, but it does..
even with a older version of firefox, your ping time is likely to be higher than how long it takes your browser and system to process the javascript on the average webpage.
Why cant firefox makers work on making the browser multithreaded? (or at least do what chrome does and move each tab onto it's own thread so the browser wont hang when you reload all tabs at the same time).
I will be happy if you can spend some time to deal with this problem which has been lasting for very long time.
there any reason to upgrade yet?
and Safari 8....