Last night I decided to try the performance of the new TraceMonkey feature. TraceMonkey is an improvement to Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, which enables JIT optimizations to SpiderMonkey, which means that the engine optimizes the parts of your JavaScript code which run repeatedly (e.g., loops). For more information on TraceMonkey, check out Brendan's announcement of TraceMonkey. I gave Mozilla's Dromaeo, Webkit's SunSpider, and Google's V8 Benchmark Suite a try, and the results follow.

With the feedback from Alex Faaborg on the status of Private Browsing in Firefox, and urged by the Incognito browsing mode in Chrome and Internet Explorer's InPrivate Browsing (and of course, Safari's Private Browsing mode), it seems that there's a chance to have this in Firefox 3.1. In case you don't already know, I had written a patch which added support for the Private Browsing mode a while back, but it never saw the light of the day.

If you're a heavy user of Gmail and tabs in Firefox, you have certainly noticed that when you switch to the Gmail tab in your browser, Gmail shortcut keys do not work, unless you focus the page (via clicking on it, tabbing through it, etc.) Edward Lee has put together a very useful Greasemonkey script, which is a definite must-have. Go ahead and install it right now, and no more extra Tabs/clicks!

One of the projects that had kept me busy for the past few days was the translation of addons.mozilla.org into Persian. The work is nearly done now, and is available for testing. If you're an Iranian user or can speak Persian, please take a look around, and let me know if you find any mistakes, or can suggest any imporvements. You can also view the progress of the translation here, and keep an eye on the fixes I make in the translation here.

It's always a good thing to search for something cool that you've found before blogging it, to make sure that others have not already done the same! It even helped me see a PHP trick that should be familiar to seasoned C/C++ programmers… Oh, and for those who want to read it here as well, here's a one-liner to swap the values of two variables in PHP: list($a, $b) = array($b, $a);

Unfortunately I was not able to obtain a visa to Canada in order to take part in the Mozilla Summit 2008. That could have been a great opportunity for me, but now that I won't be attending it, I'll try to keep up with it as much as possible. I really wish that all of the slides/materials from the sessions would be made available online. I'll also make sure to keep an eye on the pictures from the Summit, as well as Planet Mozilla, which I'm sure is going to get some serious goodness during/after the sessions.