The results are pretty impressive. Running on a Mac Pro with Windows 7 Professional, Firefox 18 with IonMonkey showed a performance improvement of about 26 percent over Firefox 17 on the Kraken benchmark, for example.

A Beta Version in November

On Google's V8 benchmark, Firefox 18 was 7 percent faster than Firefox 17 and 20 percent faster than the current Firefox 15.

IonMonkey is enabled by default for desktop Firefox 18, which is currently just in Nightly build form, and it will be enabled soon for mobile Firefox as well. Firefox 18 will move to the Aurora channel on Oct. 8, with a beta release due in November. Its final launch date has yet to be determined.