Firefox 18.0 Lets Loose IonMonkey Compiler

Mozilla Firefox 18.0 is now available. The main feature of this open-source web-browser update is the introduction of IonMonkey, a faster JavaScript compiler.

IonMonkey is very fast and yields a significant JavaScript performance speed-up for Firefox over its predecessor, JägerMonkey. As described in the earlier Phoronix post, Mozilla's IonMonkey JavaScript engine is a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler that provides a new compiler that is more organized and has explicit data structures of advanced compilers. IonMonkey also lays down work for further optimizations and experimentation. IonMonkey works by translating the JavaScript code into an intermediate representation (IR), running various algorithms on the generated IR for carrying out optimizations, and then translating the optimized IR into machine code for execution.

Beyond shipping IonMonkey, Firefox 18 adds in support for Apple Retina Displays on Mac OS X 10.7+, preliminary support for the WebRTC protocol, better image quality with a new HTML scaling algorithm, performance improvements with tab switching, support for W3C touch events in HTML5, and various bug-fixes.

More details on Mozilla Firefox 18.0 are available from the Mozilla.org release notes.