If you know about Firefox 3.1 details, you know that it contains TraceMonkey, which is the new javascript engine in Firefox. Yawn, yawn? I think not! While this may seem something developer oriented, it actually speeds up javascript a lot, and I mean a lot!

I’m not really into the technical details yet, but I am currently writing this post from a nightly build of Firefox, and Gmail loading time was astoundingly fast, I didn’t even see the loading bar. For me Gmail took somewhere between 4-6 seconds to load, it now took about 1-2. I haven’t tested this thoroughly, but many javascript intensive sites like Gmail, Remember The Milk and so on were much faster. I am running four addons at the moment, if you have more you might not see such a significant increase in speed, but I think Mozilla’s going in the right direction!

If you want to try out this new tech, take a look at Lifehacker’s article, where they have some speed comparisons and explain how to get to this newest version.