In a move to make Firefox more competitive with desktop applications and proprietary graphics technology like Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash, Mozilla on this afternoon released TraceMonkey.

TraceMonkey is a project that adds native code compilation to SpiderMonkey, Mozilla’s JavaScript engine.

Mozilla has included TraceMonkey in an alpha version of Firefox 3.1, the next major release of the open-source Firefox Web browser.

TraceMonkey is off by default, because it’s not entirely bug-free but when it’s more stable and enabled, Firefox’s JavaScript should get faster “by an order of magnitude or more,” as Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich put it in a blog post:

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

Trace Monkey was built with the help of UC Irvine research scientist Andreas Gal, using a technique called “trace trees.”

Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering at Mozilla (soon to leave for Facebook), has posted a screencast demo that shows how TraceMonkey makes image editing done through Firefox competitive with dedicated image editing applications, at least in terms of the responsiveness of the user interface.

“What we’re trying to do is extend the capability of the browser,” said Eich, adding that graphics applications and games in particular stand to benefit from improved JavaScript performance. “Not everyone wants to get a plug in,” he said.

Improving browser performance is necessary to provide an open-source alternative to proprietary rendering technologies. “If browsers are only doing JavaScript and doing it slowly, we worry that content will migrate to closed platforms like Silverlight,” said Eich.

Mozilla’s support for the canvas graphic rendering element in the HTML 5 specification and the Ogg video format also reflects this goal.

If Mozilla is successful in its efforts, the rationale for developing rich Internet applications (RIAs) will become increasingly questionable. As Eich sees it, RIAs are already at risk. “Those platforms that are not a browser are an increasingly thin value-add to what the browser can do,” he said.

Eich said that when Google launched Google Maps and found that it was done without plug-ins, they were stunned. He expects that ongoing browser performance improvements will usher in similarly surprising applications.

Firefox 3.1 should be ready before the end of the year, Eich said.

In case there was any doubt that the company is still stuck in the 1990s, Microsoft hired Jerry Seinfeld as the face of its $300 million USD advertising campaign to hawk Windows Vista.

Here’s the incomprehensible part: The 54-year-old washed-up has-been was chosen because Microsoft is “weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.’s advertising,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Seinfeld is most famous for his 90s-era sitcom, which always prominently displayed a Macintosh in his TV apartment. Microsoft will pay Seinfeld $10 million.

After a large amount of internal changes and restructuring, release day is finally here.

Grab MAME 0.127 from the Latest MAME Release page.

Today marked the official launch of the Opera Mobile 9.5 beta browser. I have been waiting for this beta program for a long time now, and as soon as the beta became available, I rushed to the Opera web site to download the browser.

From today’s press release, we know that Opera Mobile 9.5 beta now defaults to page overview mode, allowing the user to view the entire Web page and instantly recognize the Web site. With panning and zooming options, the user is able to focus on specific page content. Opera also introduced a new user interface for easier navigation.

Here’s a list of some of the improvements you’ll notice over Opera Mobile 8.65:

1. Faster – Opera Mobile 9.5 beta continues this fine tradition with improved performance over Opera Mobile 8.65.
2. Pan and zoom – Just like Opera Mini, Opera Mobile 9.5 beta defaults to full Web page viewing and allows users to pan and zoom into their desired content easily.
3. Improved user interface – Opera has completely renovated its mobile UI. Cleaner and more intuitive, the new UI is designed for quick and easy navigation.
4. Opera Dragonfly – Use your Opera desktop browser to debug sites on your mobile phone through the Opera Mobile 9.5 debug menu.
5. Improved standards support – Opera Mobile 9.5 is the most standards compliant browser available, and the company remains steadfast in its commitment to make the Web accessible for all.
6. Save pages and/or images – With a click, simply save pages to your phone.

This last point is a nice touch to add. I often want to be able to save images I see on the Web. Being able to do so on your phone (where I happen to spend a lot of time browsing) is an unexpected added bonus.

Most of us reading this are probably accustomed to the idea of getting Linux for the cost of an opinion about the weather — in other words, nothing. But now Ubuntu, arguably the most visible of Linux distributions, is hitting store shelves at Best Buy for the practically impulse-buy cost of $19.99 USD.

Why pay? Two reasons: One, you get printed documentation — something people have increasingly lamented the loss of, although the cost of printing in general (and the search ability of electronic files) has pushed paper docs aside.

The other, and more significant reason, is sixty days of unlimited tech support courtesy of Canonical. Two months is a fairly decent margin of time for someone to install Ubuntu and work their way through most showstopper issues, and the most recent Ubuntu comes with a very nice gamut of tools to make migration and dual-booting a lot easier than it usually is.

The price is definitely right. The last time I saw boxed Linux on the shelf of my local Best Buy, it was SuSE, and it sported a pricetag of almost $100.00 USD (A quick search of Best Buy’s site shows they don’t even keep SuSE in stock anymore; not much of a surprise, there.)

I’d love to not only see this take off, but spawn some competition in the same space — say, perhaps from an outfit that uses the same pricing model but uses Fedora or even OpenSuSE as their base distribution.

Yep, you read that correctly. It isn’t officially available through iTunes yet, but the file is out there and can be downloaded and installed on your iPhone.

In order to snag the file to update your Apple iPhone’s firmware, go to MacRumors for the download.

MacRumors reports:

“In order to install the firmware, you will have to do it manually by pressing the Option key when pressing the ‘Check for Update’ button in iTunes. Then select the .ipsw file manually. If for some reason your download is a ‘.zip’ file, rename it to ‘.ipsw’ before proceeding.”

The Apple iPhone firmware update is a 225 MB file, so it’s going to take a while. You can also grab the iPhone1,2_2.0_5A347_Restore.ipsw firmware from here. Enjoy.