Today I encountered with a term TraceMonkey and wondered what it means. And then I look after over the net and find out that it was a project code added into the compilation to Spidermonkey, used with Mozilla’s Javascript engine. This term came into limelight to tackle the high competitions from Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe flash player by Mozilla Corporation. Tracemonkey was first introduced with the Alpha Version of Firefox 3.1 beta version but was not totally bug free.

According to Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich “If you’re doing something like image processing, we can demonstrate six to seven times speed-ups and we can probably double those, If you’re doing a tight [programming] loop that’s just manipulating bits, you can go 20 to 40 times faster.”

This technology was based on the technique called “trace trees” with the help of UC Irvine research scientist Andreas Gal. This was introduced to extend the capability of its existing browsers as it will be responsible for the most Javascript games and graphics applications.

Now this was the main reason as we found a lot of add-ons available to Mozilla Browsers and the main reason for the its popularity base.