Future versions of the Mozilla Firefox web browser will include some Flash
code, following a donation made by Adobe to the Mozilla Foundation today. The
company famous for its Photoshop and Acrobat products has
supplied the source code for its ActionScript Virtual Machine, a scripting
engine used in Flash that's based on the same ECMAScript standard as JavaScript
and Microsoft's JScript. With the donated code, Mozilla intends to kick off a
new open-source project dubbed Tamarin that will eventually become a replacement
for SpiderMonkey, Firefox's current JavaScript interpreter. Tamarin will receive
contributions from both Adobe and Mozilla developers, and the code will find its
way into Firefox by the first half of 2008, according to Frank Hecker, executive
director of the Mozilla Foundation.