Adobe has teamed up with the open source Mozilla Foundation in what can only be described as a browser platform play.

Adobe is giving Mozilla and its Firefox browser the source code for its ActionScript Virtual Machine, the standards-based scripting language engine in the Flash Player, which Adobe got when it acquired Macromedia a while back.

It should translate into more and better rich Internet applications owing little to Microsoft. It is the largest code contribution to the Mozilla Foundation since it started three years ago.

Mozilla has created a new project out of it called Tamarin. Tamarin is supposed to implement the final version of the ECMAScript 4 standard language that Mozilla will put in the next generation of SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine in the increasingly popular Firefox browser. Integration is a ways off.

Firefox of course has been slowly draining Internet Explorer's market share.

The Adobe contribution will give developers a high-performance open source virtual machine to build and deploy applications across both Flash and Firefox. Adobe's chief architect Kevin Lynch said it would bring the HTML and Flash development communities together around a common language that works consistently across PCs and mobile devices.

The Flash Player is reportedly installed on over 700 million Internet-connected PCs and mobile devices.

The ActionScript Virtual Machine has a JIT compiler that translates ActionScript bytecode into native machine code for maximum execution speed.

--Copyright Client/Server News