&gt; It was one a wave of new JS engines developed in response to the release of Chrome&#x2F;V8 which destroyed the previous generation of JS engines in terms of performance (I&#x27;m sure the various browser vendors would say they always planned to create faster JS engines, but there&#x27;s no doubt that the release of Chrome&#x2F;V8 in 2008 accelerated their efforts).<p>Well, TraceMonkey can at least legitimately argue to not be inspired by it: it was publicly announced prior to Chrome, and work obviously started on it before that.