Firefox 4 beta gets Jägermonkey

THE OVERNIGHT BUILDS of the Firefox 4 browser beta release have started to incorporate Jägermonkey.

The code is expected to speed up Firefox 4, which has been looking decidedly sluggish alongside Chrome and the early previews of IE9.

The software has been worked on by the Mozilla Javascript team and it is supposed to do for the new web browser what Tracemonkey did for Firefox 3.5.

Writing in the open source software outfit's blog, David Mandeline said that the new code supports x86, x86-64, and ARM in an almost entirely shared compiler code base. It works with the Tracemonkey trace JIT compiler, too.

If you download the new Javasript engine in the Firefox JS Engine Preview Builds your beta version of Firefox 4 should go like the clappers.

Big Javascript-heavy things like Gmail and Facebook seem to work better too, although Mandeline thinks that might be subjective.

He projected that by the time Firefox 4 is released the software should be even faster. µ