Although Chrome's performance beats the current stable version of Firefox,
Arstechnica's benchmarks show that Mozilla's next-generation JavaScript
engine actually outperforms V8. Mozilla is using tracing optimization
techniques and Adobe's open source nanojit to increase the execution speed of
SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript runtime engine in the Firefox web browser. The new
engine, which is called TraceMonkey, delivers unprecedented JavaScript
performance. The new optimizations have already landed in the latest Firefox
nightly builds (but still have to be manually enabled) and will likely be
included in Firefox 3.1. JavaScript creator and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich ran the
SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks against Chrome and the latest
TraceMonkey-enabled Firefox build, which includes some recent improvements. The
benchmarks show that TraceMonkey is clearly faster than Google's V8. Mozilla
believes that the optimization technique used in TraceMonkey has the potential
to unlock even more performance improvements.
