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JavaScript has been very broadly used to add pizzazz or flexibility to Web pages over the years, but in recent years, it's also become the plumbing for many rich Internet applications. However, because JavaScript has been hobbled by pokey performance, Web-based applications often struggled to work as responsively as "native" software running directly on PCs, and programmers writing Web applications have often turned to other options, such as Adobe Systems' Flash and Flex.

Now Mozilla hopes to change the balance of power in JavaScript's favor.

"TraceMonkey is a project to bring native code speed to JavaScript," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's interim vice president of engineering, adding that JavaScript performance nearly doubles compared to Firefox 3.0, based on the SunSpider test of JavaScript performance. That speeds up many basic tasks, but it also brings image editing and 3D graphics into JavaScript's abilities, he said.

On Thursday, Mozilla programmers built TraceMonkey into the latest developer version of the open-source Web browser, and it will appear in the next released test version, which likely will be the first beta of Firefox 3.1, Shaver said. Firefox 3.1 is due in final form by the end of the year, though Mozilla is willing to let the schedule slip a bit, if

Mozilla bragged earlier this month about TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine due to ship in
Firefox 3.1 near the end of 2008. Next came Google's Chrome, a leading feature of which is the performance of its V8 JavaScript engine. Now the WebKit programmers, whose open-source code is used in Apple's Safari browser and the Konqueror browser of the KDE interface software sometimes used on Linux systems, have a new version of their JavaScript technology.

It's called Squirrelfish Extreme, and the WebKit programmers said Thursday in a blog posting that it's more than twice as fast as the first-generation Squirrelfish announced in June and more than three times faster than the current WebKit 3.1 version. They based their conclusions on one benchmark, SunSpider.

JavaScript has grown from modest beginnings into the language of many fancy, interactive Web sites and the foundational technology for rich Web applications using a technology called Ajax. However, for many applications, it's not powerful enough, which is why Picnik's online photo editing tools use Adobe's Flash and why Microsoft is pushing its own technology called Silverlight.

Google, Yahoo, and others, though, are JavaScript fans, and speeding it up will boost countless Web sites, not just bleeding-edge applications such as Google Docs. Faster JavaScript performance is why Mozilla is so eager to talk about a project called TraceMonkey coming with Firefox 3.1, why WebKit programmers are working hard on a project called SquirrelFish, and one reason why Microsoft is eager to move people to its forthcoming Internet Explorer 8.