All the rage seems to be who has the fastest JavaScript engine these days. Chrome has it's V8 engine, Firefox with their TraceMonkey, and there is also the WebKit project. What I wanted to do was get some hard data to compare all these engines along with older browsers.

So I've been using FF3.1b1 and have loved it. The speed improvements and cool new alt+tab style tab switcher have really been incredible. GMail has never loaded so quickly for me. The only thing I couldn't get working right away was Flash. So I dug around a bit and realized it was a matter of copying a file into the plugins folder of my beta installation.

Firefox has just released it's newest beta. In this beta is their new javascript engine called TraceMonkey which is, however, disabled by default. It's easy to enable though by toggling a simple option in about:config. Look for "javascript.options.jit.content" and set it to true.

Ah, this is something I've been meaning to address just haven't got around to it. Today I decided I'd look into fixing problems with dark themes and Firefox. Basically, if you're using a dark theme with Ubuntu 8.04 and Firefox 3 a lot of websites will show up with black or dark input boxes and black font inside those. Even some buttons will show up black with black font. This is a huge hassle when it comes to productivity.