I bet you never saw this coming: Adobe donates the ActionScript engine to Mozilla.

When I first heard this from an Adobe User Group Breeze meeting, all I can say was “Whoa!” Almost all Adobe User Group managers shared the same reaction. Now that it’s official, what does the Tamarin Project mean for us:

• Adobe and Mozilla will be bridging the gap between Flash and AJAX by incorporating the Flash Player and ActionScript in any Gecko-based application.
• It may be possible to see “Flash Email” in your Thunderbird client.
• No more Flash plugin installation!

By the way, Tamarin is ECMAScript-compliant, so it will be easy to migrate your JavaScript knowledge to develop applications when it is implemented in a year and a half’s time.

Trivia: Tamarin name comes from the small monkeys found in South America (Thanks Wikipedia!). In Filipino, the word “tamarin” translates to “to become lazy.”