Firefox 58 Bringing Faster WebAssembly Compilation With Two-Tiered Compiler

With the launch of Mozilla Firefox 58 slated for next week, WebAssembly will become even faster thanks to a new two-tiered compiler.

The new WebAssembly compiler in Firefox 58 is said to be 10-15 times faster than the existing optimizing compiler and so fast that it can compile code faster than it comes over the network: the WebAssembly code can be compiled at 30~60MB/s or around 8MB/s on an "average" mobile device.

If you are curious how Mozilla has managed to make their WebAssembly compiler for Firefox so much faster, go checkout this Mozilla Hacks blog post published this morning that provides all the juicy technical bits on their compiler work.

Firefox 58.0 is scheduled to officially ship on 23 January, but those wanting to try out the two-tiered compiler can already do so via the 58 Beta or Firefox Nightly.