Download Firefox 18 Alpha
Features IonMonkey.
If you thought that the JavaScript engines couldn’t possible become any faster, you were wrong. According to the recent blog post. Mozilla has just released the alpha version of the Firefox 18 web browser and boy does it look good.
Long story short, IonMonkey is a new JavaScript JIT, which optimizes JavaScript before it’s converted to the machine code.
The result? A significant improvement in the performance.
As seen in the charts above, it completes the Kraken benchmark up to 26% faster than the Firefox 17 while improvements in the Google’s V8 test suite range from 7% (when compared to FF17) to 20%.
Impressive? Head over to the source for all the technical details.
Download
Firefox 18 Alpha
About (Author Profile)
Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Does this beat Chrome ?
Nope.
But it is fast enough to be faster than Chrome in some use cases.
And as source note. This is also about infrastructure for further compiler research (which will be simpler).
The project I’m doing with someone else has glitching issues with IM since it’s slower than the previous JIT, JaegerMonkey, in our case. Hopefully they can improve it in the Nightlies since we’re currently testing in that as well as Chromium.
(In college so I can’t sign in)
Like the release channel more,I will wait to use the final version.I’m still use firefox 15.Glad to see these good changes, but I’ll be happier if firefox can solve the Memory leak problem completely.That’s the main reason why I don’t use firefox as default,
even in Avant browser firefox is not my default engine although I like it better.
Haven’t they fixed the memory problems?