Adobe announced a partnership with the Mozilla Foundation. Adobe contributed the code for the ActionScript 3.0 VM that powers Flash Player 9. Why is this noteworthy? Because the new VM is a speed demon and the folks at Mozilla working on ECMAScript 4 could certainly benefit from access to the IP that some of the top minds at Adobe created. The new project is called Tamarin, named after a cute monkey.

Strategically, the move makes a lot of sense:

• By helping stand up Mozilla, Adobe is putting pressure on IE and Microsoft before a major showdown with the world’s largest software company. With Vista, Microsoft will go directly after both PDF and Flash with its own set of technologies. Adobe needs all the help it can get.
• Offense being the best defense, the company is pushing into the desktop with Flash Apollo, mobile with Qualcomm and operator partnerships and now even the browser.
• Last but not least, the code may help better integrate Flash with the browser (and hence AJAX), which will be a great thing. As David Berlind writes:

First, the more I talk to people about Flash becoming the “operating system” of choice for highly interactive-based Web apps, the more I hear “uh huh.” AJAX and Flash are like peanut butter and jelly with one providing base-level interactivity and the other bringing that interactivity to life.

Update: check out Tunic’s post for more details. And, he has a much better Tamarin picture…