I was really shocked today to hear that Adobe is about to give their javascript engine to Mozilla. To give and for free, no payment and apparently no interest from Adobe’s side. It is going to be connected to the SpiderMonkey under the Tamarine project and should be available in firefox as early as already in the year 2008 (version 3.5 or 4).
Just to give you an idea about what it is – this is an Actionscript 3 engine is an implementation of unfinished!!! specification of the version 4 of ECMAscript. This ActionScript-Javascript code is one of the most important parts of the Flash 9 engine. Yes, the Adobe(Macromedia) flagship product – Flash in its latest (ninth) incarnation. I am still astonished about this fact. No doubts, Adobe is doing this for some good reason but so far as of now – i really dont know what is the reason.
Adobe is going to face stronger concurrence from Microsoft – Expression Designer and Metro formats should be coming on the market in the next couple of months, and everybody knows, that when redmond guys are coming to the market, then you better watch out and hold on. Perhaps it is a move to help develop since a lot of years the stagnated javascript in browsers, as by no chance would they come to Microsoft and ask them about the cooperation in this area. Franz Hecker ( executive director of Mozilla foundation) has already written in his blog his thoughts about this cooperation. He expects as a result following changes:
- Faster AJAX applications executions
In its own testing Adobe has seen up to a ten times speedup of ActionScript applications due to the introduction of the AVM2 technology
- Major cooperations with Adobe in the future (for Adobe gaining a partner such as Mozilla is a very good thing)
- Innovative web 2.0 applications development speed increase (dont know about this one, as long as IE is still around =O) )
I anticipate more such “donations” to mozilla in the nearest future, as a sign of Firefox support, especially from IBM such move would be less then surprising.