Good news for Mozilla products, soon we could gain as much as 10x performance boost on our JavaScripts / ECMAScripts.

SAN FRANCISCO — November 7, 2006 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) and the Mozilla Foundation, a public-benefit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet, today announced that Adobe has contributed source code for the ActionScript™ Virtual Machine, the powerful standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe® Flash® Player, to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications.

The Tamarin project will implement the final version of the ECMAScript Edition 4 standard language, which Mozilla will use within the next generation of SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, Mozilla’s free Web browser. As of today, developers working on SpiderMonkey will have access to the Tamarin code in the Mozilla CVS repository via the project page located at www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/. Contributions to the code will be managed by a governing body of developers from both Adobe and Mozilla.

“Adobe’s work on the new virtual machine is the largest contribution to the Mozilla Foundation since its inception,” said Brendan Eich, chief technology officer, Mozilla Corporation, and creator of JavaScript. “Now web developers have a high-performance, open source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox web browser. We’re excited about joining the Adobe and Mozilla communities to advance ECMAScript.”

Roadmap
The Tamarin project is just getting started so the roadmap is not yet fully developed, but some of the technical goals include:

1. Integrating the Tamarin VM and garbage collector within SpiderMonkey
2. Using the SpiderMonkey compiler to generate code for Tamarin
3. Porting the just-in-time compiler to new hardware platforms
4. Completing the self-hosting ECMAScript 4 compiler

• Adobe and Mozilla Foundation to Open Source Flash Player Scripting Engine
• Mozilla Tamarin Project

Firefox 2 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the fourth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 2. Ongoing planning for Firefox 2 can be followed at the Firefox 2 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #bonecho.

Please note: It is not recommended that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 2 Beta 1 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only, normal users are encouraged to get the latest public release of Firefox.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Built in Phishing Protection
• Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
• Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
• Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
• Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
• Search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
• New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
• New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
• New Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
• Support for JavaScript 1.7
• Support for client-side session and persistent storage
• Extended search plugin format
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath

• Firefox 2 Beta 1 milestone released

I just discovered that my blog has render errors on IE, and since I couldn’t quickly find the error I promised myself to finally get on with it and create a completely new design. This will also be a good opportunity for me to upgrade to WordPress 2.x. However I have more urging projects on my todo list, so it won’t happen as swift as I would have wanted.

So for all you oldschoool guys still using Internet Explorer, this would also be a good opportunity to upgrade you browsing life by getting hold of the latest Firefox browser and perhaps even the magnificient Thunderbird.

UPDATE: I fixed the render bug, by accident I had created a very long post-tag which killed the IE layout.

UPDATE 2 (March, 19 2006): The blog is now running under WordPress 2.x and MySQL 5.x, and everything seems to work fine.

mozillaZine: Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is now available for download. Also known as the 1.8 Beta 4 milestone, this is the first beta release of the next major Firefox update and is aimed at testers, extension/theme authors and Web developers. The final release of Firefox 1.5, which will be widely promoted to end-users, is scheduled for later this year.

Please note that this is NOT for normal users, it will replace the current Firefox and will disable most extensions. However for developers it’s great! Looking forward to doing more E4X stuff, as well as SVG demos!

Release Notes for Firefox 1.5 Beta 1

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 Released

Nader Cserny at bandnews.org sent me a notice that he and his team have just released their site. The reason he told me is that it is using AJAX extensively, and as he said “Unlike all the hyped websites we tried to use Ajax in an intelligent and useful way.” This of course lit my appetite and the rest is history.

The site acts as an RSS aggregator for music bands. This could of course easily be refurnished for other purposes, but I think it’s quite neat idea, which might also make RSS feeds more accessible to the non-techies out there (because they won’t know it’s RSS before it’s too late!! he he)…

The website uses yet another “AJAX” / Rich-App framework called Prototype (JavaScript toolkit for class-driven development). I am not sure what to think of this framework myself, but perhaps it’s because I am too much in love with my own. The code is pretty much stripped from comments, making it hard to grasp all the cool stuff (No, manuals are not enough when trying to read sourcecode, not even a single line describing each class! truly bad code habit). Ok so I don’t think Prototype can be called an Ajax framework, since it does so much more it’s more proper to call it Rich-App framework. Personally I would have divided stuff up in more modular parts, i.e. there is a toColorPart() function in the same framework as Ajax and Event code.. This makes me itch, but ofcourse it’s just me flaming other peoples code, which I’m sure will haunt me in my dreams… Check out their own demos, and also a host of fancy UI components made by others with the use of Prototype, such as Rico. There is some really great stuff there.

Bandnews.org - Search & Read Music News.

Prototype JavaScript Framework