Today brings huge news for web developers everywhere: the ActionScript 3 VM is being contributed to the Mozilla foundation. This includes the virtual machine, the JITer, the verifier and the garbage collector (this is about 135,000 lines of code). Here’s the announcement from Emmy Huang, Flash Player Product Manager and a great entry from Tinic Uro of the Flash Player team.

And here’s a great quote from Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla and creater of JavaScript: “Adobe’s work on the new virtual machine is the largest contribution to the Mozilla Foundation since its inception. Now web developers have a high-performance, open source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox web browser. We’re excited about joining the Adobe and Mozilla communities to advance ECMAScript.”

The possibilities are endless, and you can easily imagine writing ECMAScript 4 for both the browser and a SWF (maybe even in Flex Builder…who knows?). Soon, an entire world of JavaScript developers will be able to write ActionScript, broadening the developer base for Flex and Flash. The future looks bright, and stay tuned…it can only get brighter.