Adobe Donates Flash Code to Mozilla

eddie · 08-11-2006, 01:54 AM

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Adobe announced at the Web 2.0 conference on Tuesday that it was donating the scripting language engine from Flash to the Mozilla Foundation, where it will become an open source project called Tamarin as well as being integrated directly into the Firefox Web browser.

Specifically, Adobe is opening up its ActionScript Virtual Machine, which forms the core of Flash Player version 9. The most recent release in June added improved debugging, faster start times, full runtime error reporting, and better performance.

The code is the largest contribution to Mozilla since the organization was founded in 2003. The basic idea of the effort is to accelerate the development of the standards-based language in order to promote the development of rich Web applications, along with making them run more smoothly in Firefox.

Source: BetaNews
Official announcement by Mozilla is here

What it means for common user

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Let's start with users of Firefox and other applications based on Mozilla technology. They'll get future versions of Firefox and other Mozilla-based products that will run JavaScript-based applications significantly faster, including in particular AJAX-enabled web applications commonly thought of in connection with the Web 2.0 meme. (In its own testing Adobe has seen up to a ten times speedup of ActionScript applications due to the introduction of the AVM2 technology.) Since Firefox and Firefox extensions are partly written in JavaScript (as are other applications built on Mozilla's XUL technology), users will also likely see performance gains in some areas of Firefox itself.

Developers of web applications and XUL-based applications will also realize the benefits of improved performance; they'll be able to develop and deploy new and innovative applications for which the performance demands on current JavaScript engines are just too great. They'll also be able to take advantage of new JavaScript language features coming with ECMAScript 4th Edition, and in addition will be more able to leverage their knowledge of JavaScript in developing Flash applications using ActionScript (or vice versa).

Read more here
Also read: Could Adobe’s contribution to Mozilla force MS to take Internet Explorer open source?