Tendency would be converse after 30 years. The previous famous Firefox is now forced to change its version number frequently becuase of the rise of Chrome. Last month Mozilla released Firefox 15 and also released news about Firefox 17, And now Firefox 18 is also ready to come out.
According to PCWorld, to keep the promise of bring quicker and smoother experience, Mozzila will adopts new JavaScript technology in Firefox 18. The new Firefox with new JavaScript technology will be 26% quicker than Firefox 17. If we take Google Chrome's v8 engine as a benchmark, then Firefox will be 7% quicker than Firefox 17 and 20% quicker than the current Firefox 15.
The new technolgy is called IonMonkey, which is a Just-In-Time(JIT) compiler, it will partially replace JagerMonkey which is released in 2010. Essentially, IonMonkey works by first translating JavaScript into what's called an “intermediate representation” (IR). Next, it runs various algorithms to optimize the IR and then, finally, it translates the result into machine code.
This process looks very complex, then will this affect the efficiency of the JS engine? Currently there are not too much details about this technology, but Mozilla says the new technology targets long-running applications; for very short ones, Firefox still uses JägerMonkey.
IonMonkey will be enabled by default for desktop Firefox 18 and it will be enabled soon for mobile Firefox as well. Firefox 18 will have beta release in November. Its final launch date has yet to be determined.
Reference : http://www.36kr.com/p/153146.html
