Mozilla has just unleashed its latest weapon in the battle for freedom on the web. Even on the face of it, OdinMonkey, a new Firefox module that boosts JavaScript performance in the browser by 1,000%, sounds impressive, with a fantastic potential for browser-based gaming and web-based applications. However, the potential impact of OdinMonkey, particularly within the mobile space, is immense. OdinMonkey is a subset of JavaScript, which can be compiled to run as fast as executables, overcoming many of the performance drawbacks of standard, just-in-time (JIT) compiled JavaScript.
Initially developed under the name ‘asm.js’ by Mozilla’s David Herman, Luke Wagner and Alon Zakai, OdinMonkey allows developers to write applications in C or C++ and to compile the code into JavaScript using Emscripten. “asm.js can be implemented massively faster than anything existing JavaScript engines can do, and it’s closing the gap to native more than ever,” explained David Herman. On phones, the performance of browserbased apps has always lagged well behind that of native apps that run directly in iOS or Android. Standard JavaScript typically runs 10-20 times slower than native code in most browsers.
Running in Firefox, OdinMonkey closes this gap to 50 per cent of native code performance. This performance kick delivers a massive boost for Mozilla’s championing of cross-platform open web technologies such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript across the fi xed and mobile internet. It puts open apps within striking distance of native app performance. And for the many developers writing native apps in C and C++, it also provides a relatively simply way to release a browser-based version and reach a broader market.
The OdinMonkey module is due to be implemented in the desktop release of Firefox scheduled for 22 June, with a mobile version to follow soon after.
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