Next Firefox JavaScript Engine to Use WebKit

By Vygantas Lipskas | March 5, 2010 | 10 Comments

Next Firefox JavaScript Engine to Use WebKitAccording to hacks.mozilla.org, the upcoming Firefox JavaScript engine (codenamed JägerMonkey) will be using some of the WebKit code snippets to speed things up.

Although JägerMonkey is still in early stages, engine is already 18% faster than its predecessor (thanks to WebKit). Furthermore, ETA is not yet announced.

As for codename, Jäger is a German word that means “hunter”, go figure.

Thanks to mabdul and Nox for the news tip.

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About (Author Profile)


Vygantas Lipskas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • http://my.opera.com/rafaelluik Rafael

    Can’t they never do something new? Just for a change, common..

    • Pete

      don’t be so quick with your judgment… technology-transfer is quite common between open-source projects.
      chrome for example uses NSS which came from firefox.

      besides that it’s not the whole JS-engine just a part of it!
      the firefox JS-engine will still be tremendously different in its architecture, than the safari/chrome ones…

  • Morbus

    Hasn’t Mozilla been doing something new for the past half decade? I don’t really get you, Rafael.

    Still, I think they should just get as much from webkit’s javascript engine as possible. It’s very powerful, and I think it’d go brilliant with Gecko.

    • nvm

      Mozilla can’t speed up Firefox on their own. And it will still be the slowest (except IE) after ripping off Safari.

  • Anachron

    For those unable to read.

    Christopher Blizzard:

    Yeah, well, to be clear we’re taking a pretty small piece of the WebKit engine and using it. (It’s clean code compared to the one that’s in V8.)
    And we’re still using a small bit of the old Tamarin project called Nanojit. We still collaborate heavily with Adobe on that, sharing a lot of code and work.
    So, yeah, it’s interesting to see how we’re actually collaborating with other browsers on code. The default for browsers is now open source (at least with the core engines.) Makes things easier in a lot of ways.

  • Ichann

    Desperation much?

    Labs.Mozilla seems much more interesting now.

  • nvm

    Sounds like they are using Nitro rather than WebKit. Nitro is Safari’s JS engine, and it’s parts of the JS engine they will be using, right?

    • Ichann

      Probably what they meant. But Nitro is incorporated into Webkit hence both of these statements are correct

  • Dels

    for whatever reason… i’m glad to see speedier JS engine on the future, Carakan, V8, Nitro, and those JagerMonkey would be cool, now let’s see what IE team decide to take on their JS engine

  • Pete

    here is an official mozilla followup, about what parts are really used, and where they came from:
    http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/a-quick-note-on-javascript-engine-components/

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