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Mozilla is working on a new optimization technique to bring an impressive boost to the Firefox Javascript engine performance. This update is aimed for Firefox version 3.1, and although it’s available in the nightly builds now, it’s not enabled by default. If you want to give it a try, check this link

They are "getting ready to take JavaScript performance into the next tier" with a radically innovative optimization tactic called tracing that has already produced performance improvements ranging between 20 and 40 times faster in some cases. They believe that this is just the beginning of what can be accomplished with tracing, and they expect to be able to achieve even better speed as the work continues, says Ryan Paul of Ars Technica.

Schrep has done some testing on a nightly build and the results and details can be see here stating that the improvements. According to Schrep, It runs about 7x faster using the JIT than Firefox 3. From what I understand there are some very straightforward optimizations for the tracing work (basically specializing for the fact that we are loading/storing ints into the array) that can probably speed this up around 2-4x very soon.

The performance of web application would increase dramatically after this update, and this will be a benchmark for all others to follow ( hint : IE! ). The only thing holding back web applications is the Javascript interpreter performance now, as most users now have broadband connections and the improvement in execution speed of client side javascript interpreting performance is the need nowadays.

The improvement is due to a tracing optimization pioneered by by Dr. Michael Franz and Dr. Andreas Gal, research scientists at the University of California, Irvine.

To get a real-world performance increase right now, Mozilla has adapted the tracing technology and Adobe’s nanojit so that they can be integrated directly into SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript interpreter that is used in Firefox 3. This has produced a massive speedup that far surpasses what is currently possible with Tamarin-tracing. In addition to empowering web developers, the optimizations will also improve the general performance of the browser itself and many extensions because many components of the program are coded with JavaScript.

The competition might not be tough when you put IE in the equation as they have the most pathetic performance in JS interpretation amongst all popular browsers, but Apple is not sitting quietly. Ryan says

Apple has also been implementing some extremely impressive JavaScript performance improvements with its compelling SquirrelFish virtual machine engine, which will be included in Safari 4. Like Mozilla, Apple says that the current performance gains delivered by the latest optimization techniques only scratch the surface of what is possible.

These improvements only mean that the fastest browsers will be victorious. It’s not just about market share anymore, it’s about performance. And unless Microsoft provides some competition to Firefox and Safari, the 20% market share of Firefox is only going to keep on increasing, not to mention Safari’s market share, as from an average user’s point of view, these browsers just work well and fast – things which Internet Explorer is missing out on.