Firefox 18 speeds up with the new JavaScript engine "IonMonkey"

At the end of August"Firefox 15" official version releasedHowever, "Firefox 18", which is supposed to be released around the end of 2012 or early 2013, will clearly show that the benchmark result will be significantly improved and speed up than before by the new JavaScript engine "IonMonkey" It was.

IonMonkey in Firefox 18 | Mozilla Developer Street (modest)


Firefox has been equipped with three engines, SpiderMonkey, TraceMonkey, and JägerMonkey. Of course, I improved the performance gradually, but IonMonkey introduced from Firefox 18 was originally developed as a new architecture.

Conventional engines performed almost direct conversion when converting from JavaScript to machine language, and there was no intermediate step. However, IonMonkey carries out the process of "converting JavaScript to intermediate representation", "executing many algorithms to optimize intermediate representation" and "converting optimized intermediate representation to machine language".

Result of Google V8 benchmark. Currently the official version of Firefox 15 is 8474, the aurora version (before the beta version) Firefox 17 is 9511, and the Firefox 18 is 10188. It is improved by 20% compared with Firefox 15.


Result of Kraken benchmark. Numbers represent the number of times that can be executed in one minute, the larger the number, the better. There is no big difference between Firefox 15 and Firefox 17, but Firefox 18 has improved by 26% compared to Firefox 17.


IonMonkey will be enabled by default from Firefox 18. Firefox 18 is still in a state of Nightly, it shifts to the Aurora version on October 8 and the beta version on November 20, it is expected that the official version will be released around the beginning of 2013 from the end of December.