Firefox 3.5 ships!

Today saw the release of version 3.5 of the Firefox browser from the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox has been the most popular alternative browser to Internet Explorer (IE) for many years and with this release it pulls significantly ahead of IE both in terms of JavaScript performance and support for HTML 5.0 web standards. I’m personally very excited to see this release as it brings all of these new features to ARM-based devices as well as Intel.

Over the past year we’ve been working with the guys at Mozilla in a couple of areas to enhance the performance of Firefox: In the summer of last year Mozilla announced a new high performance JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey that uses a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to compile and execute frequently executed JavaScript sequences in the processors native code rather than interpreting it. TraceMonkey uses a code generator called Tamarin to generate the native code and over the past 12 months the guys at ARM have been working to enhance the code it produces for our latest processors. The project is still ongoing and because it is open source it will benefit not only Firefox but other open source projects that use Tamarin such as Adobe Flash.

The other area we’ve been working on is enhancing the performance of the Cairo 2D graphics library which is used by Firefox and some versions of Webkit. Modern day ARM processors contain a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) processor called NEON that lends itself quite well to pixel manipulation and so we have been recoding parts of Cairo’s Pixel Manipulation Library (Pixman) to make use of NEON and improve the performance of web page rendering and the Firefox user interface.

Firefox 3.5 is a big leap in version numbers from 3.0 and big leap in features too. I’ll post more on the enhanced features later this week.