TuxTraining

Mozilla has just pushed out Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 to their servers, marking the first major step toward the official 3.1 release. They haven’t yet officially announced the beta release, so the What’s New page is a 404 as of this writing.

There is a huge speed increase in the way that Firefox 3.1 will handle Javascript, either matching and sometimes beating Google Chrome. Most of this speed increase is due to the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. Despite the fact that TraceMonkey comes built into 3.1, you still have to know how to enable it to take advantage. Here’s how it works:

1. Open about:config in your browser.
2. Paste javascript.options.jit.content into the filter.
3. Double-click the remaining preference to set the boolean to true.
4. Done.

Old hardware? Want a faster boot up? Need to free some system resources? Want snappier applications? This is for you.  Note, I wouldn’t suggest doing anything within this if it doesn’t make sense to you.

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