IonMonkey JavaScript Lands in Firefox 18, Speeds Things Up

By Wolfgang Gruener
published

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.

Contact Us for News Tips, Corrections and Feedback

Wolfgang Gruener
18 Comments Comment from the forums
  • skyline100
    Long live firefox!!
    Reply
  • JasonAkkerman
    Link is broken. It should be http://arewefastyet.com/, not http://arewefatsyet.com/.
    Reply
  • freggo
    FF 18?
    really? Dang, I am still on '14'
    No wonder by girlfriend left me and the dog looks funny at me :-)
    Reply
  • ikefu
    Now if only every industry could have the kind of competition that the browser market does. If that were true we might have flying cars and quantum CPUs by now. Competition fosters innovation and Javascript engines that people stay up late to wring every last ounce of performance out of.
    Reply
  • Cryio
    " flying cars and quantum CPUs by now". Funny thing you said. Just saw the Back to the Future movies yesterday :))
    Reply
  • egidem
    Firefox 18?? Why are they moving so fast?? Honestly, what is the hurry? It's like people just fix a bug and then increment the counter to a new version....the speed is crazy.
    Reply
  • willard
    egidemFirefox 18?? Why are they moving so fast?? Honestly, what is the hurry? It's like people just fix a bug and then increment the counter to a new version....the speed is crazy.It's an agile process. The goal is to produce lots of incremental improvements rapidly for release.
    Reply
  • math1337
    Version numbers are just that, numbers. I don't see any reason to complain about a numbering scheme, when the actual functionality is what matters. Might as well call it Firefox 4.18 or something.
    Reply
  • The reason Chrome and Firefox are using high version numbers, and incrementing the Major Version number for each bug fix as opposed to the Minor Version is because they think the simpletons out there will assume:

    "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...
    Reply
  • johnnyupgrade
    Usually a jump in version number signifies some major changes. Appending a higher number every time a few bugs are fixed is kind of a slap in the face to people who know that. Next thing you know they'll be adding buzzwords to the end. Maybe by this time next year we'll all be upgrading from Firefox 37 Ultra to Firefox 38 Extreme.
    Reply