New UCI technology makes Internet experience faster

Mozilla has released a prototype of its next Firefox browser that features a significantly faster Web experience, thanks to technology invented by UC Irvine computer science professor Michael Franz (pictured) and his former doctoral student Andreas Gal. This latest version of Firefox includes a new JavaScript code translator program known as a “compiler,” based on a method invented by Franz and Gal. Compiler is up to 40 times faster than the previous method. Since many popular Web 2.0 applications are heavily based on JavaScript, they can now run about seven times faster than they do in the current Firefox browser and about 15 times faster than in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. The UCI-invented technology will become standard in Firefox version 3.1, scheduled for full release later this year.