Just a few weeks ago I was writing about even as was getting ready to debut, and now there's exciting news about the forthcoming Firefox 18 as well.

Specifically, new JavaScript technology in this upcoming release makes the open source browser as much as 26 percent faster than Firefox 17, promising a quicker, snappier experience for users.

Dubbed IonMonkey, the new technology is a just-in-time (JIT) compiler that will partly replace , which was launched in 2010.

'We've Been Missing a Key Component'

"SpiderMonkey has a storied history of just-in-time compilers," explains a Wednesday on Mozilla's JavaScript blog. "Throughout all of them, however, we've been missing a key component you'd find in typical production compilers, like for Java or C++."