Firefox just released the first beta of Firefox 18, which will be a milestone release for Mozilla as it introduces the IonMonkey JIT compiler.
Firefox users can expected a considerable speed bump in complex JavaScript applications over the JaegerMonkey engine that was launched with Firefox 4 in early 2011. Mozilla currently
claims that IonMonkey, which is similar in its architecture to Google's Crankshaft in Chrome, is not too far behind Chrome in the Kraken benchmark, and provides a substantial performance increase in Google's v8 benchmark.
