Mar 22 2009
What is TraceMonkey introduced in Mozilla Firefox?
Today i encountered with a term TraceMonkey and wondered what it means. And then i look after it i found that it was a project code added into the compilation to Spidermonkey, used with Mozilla’s Javascript engine. It was an effort by Mozilla to tackle the competitions from its rivals Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe flash. It was first introduced into the Alpha Version of Firefox 3.1, though not fully completed as it was not entirely bug free.
According to Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich “If you’re doing something like image processing, we can demonstrate six to seven times speed-ups and we can probably double those, If you’re doing a tight [programming] loop that’s just manipulating bits, you can go 20 to 40 times faster.”
This technology was based on the technique called “trace trees” with the help of UC Irvine research scientist Andreas Gal. This was introduced to extend the capability of its existing browsers as it will be responsible for the most Javascript games and graphics applications.
Now this was the main reason as we found a lot of add-ons available to Mozilla Browsers and the main reason for the its popularity base.
