By David Fekke
January 17th, 2011
Adobe announced that they are going to be open sourcing the code for the Flash avm2 to the Mozilla. Avm2 is the compiler used in Flash 9 for running ActionScript 3. AS3 is based on the ECMAScript 4, and is the same as what the next version of JavaScript.
Avm2 is extremely fast because it is very similar to how the Java VM and the .NET CLR work. Right now in most browsers JavaScript is interpreted. When Mozilla switches over to the avm2 compiler, their browser will be able to take advantage of this technology for executing JavaScript code on the page.
With more and more web sites using advanced JavaScript for things like AJAX applications, this will a positive impact on the overall performace of these applications.