Mozilla is making much more progress with Firefox 4 lately. Beta 4 received the fantastic Panorama (Tab Candy) feature, Beta 5 is planned to switch on hardware acceleration by default and it appears that we may see the highly anticipated JaegerMonkey (JM) Java Script engine, which will bring Firefox’s speed closer to its rivals again.

Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner told developers that he is expecting “a large merge from the JavaScript team on or around September 1”, which is in line with a previous announcement that JM would be ready on that date. Beltzner requested a “quiet tree” for the landing of the JavaScript engine, but there is a good chance that we will see the new technology in Beta 5, which is due on September 6.

However, it appears that Mozilla isn’t exactly in a hurry, as Beltzner also announced that the feature freeze was moved From September 1 to September 10 and only this features that may miss “any beta” will be cut from Firefox 4. Originally, Mozilla anticipated seven betas and now it seems that there is a good chance that we will see up to nine. So there is still some time and JM may miss Beta 5.

At this time, the JM team indicates that the Sunspider JavaScript performance is somewhere in the neighborhood of 475 ms, which is about 20% faster than the most recent TraceMonkey implementation in the current Firefox 4 Beta 4, but it is about 8% behind IE9 PP4 and well behind Opera 10.7 (350 ms) and Chrome (305 ms) on our test systems. Mozilla said that it aims for a performance of less than 400 ms for JM or a performance within 20% of Chrome 5. We expect Microsoft to improve its JavaScript performance until the release of IE9 Beta again and be about as fast as Firefox 4 with the JM engine by the end of September.

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