Over the past few weeks, Vladimir Vukićević has been working on getting TraceMonkey working on the ARM architecture which is frequently used in mobile and handheld devices. “[M]obile and handheld platforms are going to quickly become consumers of the full web, and core performance gains will often yeild much more significant user-perceptible performance improvements. The result of all this work will be a richer web experience on mobile and embedded devices, by allowing those users to take advantage of modern web applications that do much of their work on the browser instead of server side.” Vlad’s TraceMonkey work will be available for testing in the next alpha release of Fennec (the code name for Firefox Mobile) by enabling a configuration setting the same way testers can enable TraceMonkey in Firefox nightly builds. For more information, including a host of technical details, see Vlad’s weblog.

While JavaScript engine performance has been undergoing a renaissance, JavaScript benchmark tests haven’t been keeping pace, and aren’t adapting well to the rapid performance increases we’ve been seeing. John Resig has put together a post analysing the problem, looking at three different benchmark suites — SunSpider, Dromaeo, and V8 Benchmark — and what they are doing to counter-act the problem of error levels increasing as browsers are able to run the tests more and more quickly. It’s a detailed and interesting peek into the world of JavaScript benchmarking, and you can read John’s full post on his weblog.