Firefox is about to get even faster. TraceMonkey, an evolution of Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, is now in Firefox Trunk test builds; it "uses a new kind of Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to boost JS performance by an order of magnitude or more". You can see benchmarks showing it's impressive speed improvements and read more details here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/arc...pt_lightsp.html

The new features are not enabled by default, those running Trunk builds need to enable them in about:config if they want to test this. Simply filter for jit, and toggle to "true" the two prefs that brings up: javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content. Bugs still need to be worked out, though, some users have reported crashes using this.

I, personally, crashed on this forum until I disabled the theme I was using; no problems now. The speed improvement is striking.

I can't wait to try it. :gold:

Found I can still make it crash - try to open Organize Bookmarks and boom!

A whole lotta bugs have been filed on this feature, looks like Firefox 3.1 may have to be delayed to get this sorted out.

You'll love it, Tarun; it's really fast, and it crashes really fast, too! :gold:

This next version looks to be Smokin Fast

For anyone trying it: don't enable jit.chrome, then you'll be able to organize your bookmarks instead of crashing the browser. Jit.content is what speeds up Web performance, anyway.

I think I'll jump on with beta 1's official release, or beta 2.

The final release should be awesome then.

I ditto that , can hardly wait , I'm in the need for speed.

I believe TraceMonkey wasn't checked in before the code for beta 1 was frozen, so it won't be in beta 1; should be in beta 2. Maybe by then all the crash bugs will be fixed.

I jumped on with Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 nightly build 2. I just had to try it.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1) Gecko/20081007 Firefox/3.1b1 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) - Build ID: 20081007144708

I wanted to try it out so I went to a site to test Javascript that I had also tried on Firefox 3.0.x.

My best results:

3.0.x: 294ms

3.1 Beta 1*: 71ms

*That is with javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content both enabled. :jump:

Pretty nice speedup there...

Feels faster than Chrome, though Chrome is a little faster I hear.

Been using it for a while now. Very fast and stable. I only crashed once trying to load a tab but it was just that website.

They've pretty well fixed the crashes, I haven't had one in quite a long time. I'm using Trunk nightly builds as my regular browser, they're so stable.