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irefox 83 looks set to get a big speed boost thanks to a major update to SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript engine used by the web browser. Thanks to the Warp tool, which brings big changes to the JIT (just-intime) compilers used by SpiderMonkey, Firefox 83 benefits from improved responsiveness, faster page loads and better memory usage, according to a blog post on the Mozilla Hacks site (https://bit.ly/LXF271FireFoxWarp).
The whole blog post is well worth delving into, because it goes into a lot of detail about how Warp works. There’s also some interesting performance analysis, with Google Docs loading 20 per cent faster, and apparently the team saw similar load speeds and responsiveness improvements in other websites that rely on JavaScript a lot, such as Reddit and Netflix. JavaScript code in Firefox also uses eight per cent less memory when loading a number of websites thanks to Warp.