A Faster Firefox through TraceMonkey

Ajax based applications have been gaining grounds since 2005. This has practically swept the development community since then and updates have been made in different types of applications to effectively execute Ajax. Since Ajax development is mostly thrown to open source developers, they are developed faster.

Among the leaders in this open source development of Ajax frameworks and applications is Mozilla. Their reception to Ajax particularly with JavaScript is well known since they will have the ability to process different online applications.

The goal of Mozilla through their browser Firefox is to develop the browser as a platform for different types of online applications. With an increased performance of JavaScript, they would foster a better Ajax based application.

Unfortunately, the enthusiasm for JavaScript and Ajax has been dying down for some time now. Security concerns have been increasing through the years and have taken its tool on developers. Gmail may have been the leader in email usage today but security concerns have led developers to go astray in different development platforms.

Instead of JavaScript, Flash has been gaining popularity. The use of AIR and Silverlight has been gradually increasing and JavaScript has been left out. The efforts of Mozilla would be for nothing.

But Firefox has been on their feet lately in building Firefox into something better. The developers have been building TraceMonkey which is aimed to increase the performance of JavaScript and draw developers back to the programming language.

Basically, TraceMonkey is an evolved form of SpiderMonkey. This type of add-on for Firefox has been developed for months and they are geared for release with Firefox 3.1 Beta version before the end of the year. As of this writing, development of TraceMonkey is barely three months but the speed of development is very impressive.

So how fast is TraceMonkey? Really fast. TraceMonkey promises to increase JavaScript processes up to 6.46 times. This feat is really impressive considering JavaScript can’t easily be tweaked because the 2.0 version is not even a remote realization.

With the help of TraceMoney, they can easily build an application through JavaScript and increase the application significantly. Imagine Gmail loading in your Firefox browser with a blink of an eye. The increase of speed of up to seven times is more than enough to persuade some developers to go back to Ajax and JavaScript.

TraceMonkey is not yet set to be release to the wild at the end of the year. But the buzz regarding TraceMonkey among developers is already here and has been receiving a lot of inquiries. TraceMonkey hopefully would usher a new way on how to retool browsers and run applications faster.

Browsers are now the platform for new applications since it will remove the necessity for an installation. With the increased capacity of browsers especially Firefox, developers will now build better and highly interactive Ajax and JavaScript applications. Since it will be set for release with Firefox 3.1 Beta, we’ll just have to wait and see how TraceMonkey would fare with different applications and developers.