news.com.com — Adobe will contribute source code from its ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications.
Nov 7, 2006 View in Crawl 4
millenniumxNov 7, 2006
SVG, perhaps?
macewanNov 7, 2006
Sharing is good Karma, but only if you are not expecting something in return.
mcprogrammerNov 7, 2006
It's not a new standard. It's just a different virtual machine that supports just-in-time compilation for javascript. Initially, Firefox will still use the same parser and compiler, so the language will be exactly the same.
comrade693Nov 8, 2006
It is the second largest donation, with the first largest being the initial code donation.
geminitojanusNov 8, 2006
The first story was COMPLETELY INACCURATE: Adobe's code release has about as much to do with Flash as Javascript has to do with HTML (that is, it can be use with, but is not a part of).Tamarin is an ECMAScript 4 virtual machine. All it does is run ECMAScript 4 code, be it Javascript or Actionscript. In order to run that code, it has to be compiled (which is something Adobe /didn't/ Open Source, incredibly), but they intend to write a backend for SpiderMonkey that takes Javascript from there, and compiles it into bytecode that Tamarin understands (they also intend to write this backend completely in Javascript). There's a patch-set that gets this pass-through system somewhat working (I'm surprised it compiles, actually), but there's not a lot you can use it for now. Expect extensive development next year to turn this into an actual product (and likely increase both Firefox's and everyone else's Javascript code's speed dramatically). [It's important to note that Firefox is rendered with XUL and Javascript, any speed improvements to Javascript will also improve the speed of Firefox].
arnarNov 8, 2006
Don't forget that today, Macromedia *is* Adobe, it's not as if Macromedia and all of it's people just disappeared.Capt. Picard was still Capt. Picard even when he was a Borg.
Closed AccountNov 9, 2006
It's a back door attempt to maintain their 98% of the browser market share......nothing less and nothing more.