Some Mozilla Corp. developers have recommended that the company consider yanking the new JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, from Firefox 3.1 to get the browser back on track and out the door.

Their comments came as Mozilla’s head of engineering acknowledged that the browser’s final delivery date will slip.

In a message posted to a company message forum , Firefox developer David Baron wondered how long Firefox 3.1 should be held up by TraceMonkey problems. “Without TraceMonkey, we probably could have shipped 3.1 final by now, or, if not now, within the next month,” Baron said. “I think there should be a limit to the amount we’re willing to slip 3.1 to accommodate TraceMonkey, and I think we should decide what that limit is.”

Graydon Hoare, a Mozilla developer who works on TraceMonkey, agreed. “I have to concur here,” he said in a message on the same forum thread. “TraceMonkey is really cool tech, and a remarkably quick initial development, but it’s not the whole enchilada of the browser.” Hoare, however, said it made more sense to disable TraceMonkey by default — an approach used through Beta 1 — rather than pull it from the product.

Mozilla has made much of TraceMonkey, and the performance boost it gives Firefox, since it introduced the new JavaScript engine last summer . But TraceMonkey bugs, and the slow pace in patching them, were responsible for delays last month , and for a three-week stretch this month when Mozilla put off scheduling the next preview, Beta 3.

The biggest bug now delaying Beta 3′s release is a TraceMonkey issue.

But Mozilla will probably not pull the engine, said Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, in an interview Saturday. “We’re always looking at all of our choices, but I don’t think it’s likely,” he said. “TraceMonkey is a big part of Firefox 3.1, and a big part of what we want to have for users.”

Saying that Firefox 3.1 in its current form is “quite a stable product,” Shaver said patience is a development virtue. “We’re taking the time to get this worked out,” he said. “No one will remember when Firefox 3.1 shipped other than the guy who writes the Wikipedia entry. But people will remember how Firefox 3.1 runs.”

Comments by developers such as Baron and Hoare are in no way a “revolt” by programmers, said Shaver, who added that such discussions are normal at Mozilla, and during software development in general. “There’s always talk about what we should trade off,” he said.

Mozilla conceived Firefox 3.1 as a “fast-track” update to June 2008′s Firefox 3.0, but the new browser’s progress has been much slower than originally planned. At one point, Mozilla was shooting for a final release as early as the last months of 2008, and hinted that it would use just a single beta to do so.

But Firefox 3.1 has been pushed back several times to allow Mozilla to add more features — TraceMonkey and a private browsing mode among them — and for additional testing. In November, for example, Mozilla slipped in a third beta to get a better handle on bugs.

“We wanted to be able to develop faster, and see how that manifested on the product side,” said Shaver about Firefox 3.1′s pace. “Even if we get it out in Q2, we’d be looking at about a year after Firefox 3.0, and that’s still faster than we’ve usually done.”

Shaver said he has no regrets about Firefox 3.1′s progress. “I’m very happy with how 3.1 is shaping up.”

But it’s unlikely that Firefox 3.1 will ship this quarter — for months the broad target Mozilla was touting. “To make it in Q1, we’d have to rush it more than we want to,” Shaver said. The schedule being considered now “would put it out of Q1,” he added.

There’s a possibility that Mozilla will, in fact, slate a fourth beta before it moves on to a “release candidate” build. “We do betas until we’re confident we’re done with them,” Shaver said.

Although Mozilla faces renewed pressure from Microsoft Corp. , which may wrap up Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) as quickly as next month, Shaver rejects the idea that Firefox is in a race. “No, I don’t think it is important,” he said when asked whether Mozilla needs to get Firefox 3.1 out the door before IE8. “We’re eager to get a high-quality Firefox 3.1,” he said. “This is much more about having the product done right than getting it out fast.”

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 , still the newest public release of the browser, debuted in early December 2008. It can be downloaded from Mozilla’s site in versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Anyone nitpicking about the lack of camera news from this year’s CES has nothing to complain about now. Over the past day alone, Sony, Fujifilm, Samsung, and Canon all unveiled a heaping helping of new additions to their 2009 point-and-shoot camera lineS, many of which will be unveiled at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show in Las Vegas during the first week of March.

Weeks ago, both Nikon and Panasonic also announced their own new point-and-shoot cameras for the year.

Take a look back at all the brand-new camera announcements from the past few weeks, and be sure to check back during the first week of March, when we’ll be on the PMA show floor to bring you even more camera coverage. And if you can’t wait that long, take a look at when all the cameras announced at CES will hit stores.

Some of the biggest news coming out of this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is that cell phones are finally going green. Samsung, LG, and Motorola all showed phones that would make even Al Gore crack a smile.

The biggest splash was made by Samsung’s Blue Earth phone, despite the awful marketing slogan (“Blue is the new green”). It’s rounder and a bit chunkier than your average handset, thanks to the mini solar panels striping the phone’s back panel.

Some 10 to 14 hours of direct sunlight will provide enough juice for about 4 hours of use, per the demo dude (aka, El Hombre de Demonstracion). I maintain a healthy skepticism about all claims of battery life, let alone one that relies on a nuclear furnace 93 million miles away, so I’d be pleasantly surprised if that proved true. Still…. The case is made from 100 percent recycled plastic water bottles and castor beans, whatever they are; the packaging is 100 percent recyclable and uses soy-based inks; no nasty ozone-eating chemicals are used in its production; and Samsung has a take-back program for recycling your old phones. All good stuff.

Now for the bad news: Behind the big announcement there were pitifully few specifics. Though the Samsung phone has a catchy name, that’s about all it has. It’s slated to be available sometime in the second half of the year (half a lifetime for a cell phone), but Samsung did not discuss potential carriers, what regions it would be available in, or pricing. And forget about letting journalists put their grimy fingers on them; the Blue Earth was safely ensconced inside a glass case.

Samsung also offers a conventional AC charger that draws minimal power, solving the need to talk and tan at the same time.

Still, Samsung’s phone seems less vaporous than LG’s, which had a lookalike solar powered phone (also behind glass) but didn’t have an official name yet. Otherwise the LG model looked much the same as the Samsung, using recycled plastic bottles for the housing, vegetable inks and recycled/recyclable paper for the packaging, and with a take back program for your old units.

Motorola got some skin in the green game with its Renew W233 handset, which it officially announced last month. Though not solar powered, it is made from recycled plastic, the packaging is eco friendly, and the company has purchased enough offsets to make the manufacturing process carbon neutral. It’s expected to be available some time next month.

There is at least one other player in the green phone space, though it wasn’t making flashy announcements. Instead of going for big ink (soy or otherwise) by promoting one “green” phone, Nokia is pushing to make its entire product line more eco friendly, says Johanna Jokinen, Nokia’s senior manager for environmental affairs. Toward that end it ships power-saving chargers with more than 80 percent of all its phones; uses 100 percent recycled materials; complies with European restrictions on the use of flame retardants and other toxic chemicals; and offers drop off points for old Nokia phones in more than 85 countries, as well as mail in options.

Merely by reducing the amount of packaging it ships with each phone, Nokia has taken more than 12,000 trucks off the road since 2006, saving some 474 million Euros for the company, says Jokinen.

Nokia phones also come with a cool widget called GreenExplorer that lets owners of Nokia N60 series phones calculate their carbon usage and make up for it by donating money to JPMorganClimateCare.com. For example, my Barcelona junket burned up used up about 12,000 miles of jet fuel; it will cost me roughly $22 to make amends.

Samsung, LG, and Motorola are all off to a good start, and I commend the efforts. But I think Nokia has the right idea. It’s going to take more than a few reincarnated water bottles and soy ink to make a real difference in the global climate crisis. In a more rational world, green phones wouldn’t be a separate category – they would be business as usual. That’s what I’d love to see at next year’s Mobile World Congress.

When he finally recovers from his Barcelona boondoggle, Dan Tynan will continue to tend his blogs, Culture Crash and Tynan on Tech.

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Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook are like ghetto art communities on the verge of gentrification: Hipsters are loving the first-there, build-something-from-scratch feeling, and hungry capitalists are eyeing the goods and trying to figure out how to get in on the action and make a profit. But few companies have figured out how to capitalize on all that coveted word-of-mouth and networking.

Part of the problem lies in the very nature of social networks: People just want to talk with their friends. And part of the problem is that outside of Facebook‘s stray ads, the two most talked about social networks (Facebook and Twitter) don’t really offer businesses clear-cut entry points because they don’t yet need to–Twitter, for example, is flush with US$35 million in VC funding–but eventually a sustainable business model will be necessary. Just how that profit will be made and which social networks will reign supreme is a matter of opinion.

During Social Media Week, Abrams Research polled more than 200 social media founders, bloggers, journalists, entrepreneurs and “members of the Twitterati” from across the U.S. and Canada. They asked how social networks should be monetized; which social networks are most important to them; what the future for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks holds; and more. Here are some highlights.

Users are most likely to pay for Facebook. Thirty-two percent of users say Facebook is the social media service they’d be most likely to pay for, with LinkedIn following at a close second at 30 percent, and Twitter in the number-three spot at 22 percent.

“Freemium” tops the list as the best way to monetize a social network. “Freemium,” a monetization model that offers a free basic service with a fee for advanced options such as storage or analytics, is the best way to monetize social media say 46 percent of respondents. Freemium is followed by contextual/targeted ads at 20 percent. Other methods were far behind. For example, research scored only 9 percent, and a straight-up subscription model only 6.9 percent. Banner ads and traditional online advertising scored the lowest marks at 3 percent.

Social media is crucial for keeping people up-to-date. Twenty-four percent of respondents say that the social networking feature most critical to them is the status update, while newsfeeds ranked most important with 21 percent. Comments followed at 17 percent, while personal messaging topped the list for 15 percent. Ranking much lower (under 10 percent) were uploading photos and videos, mass-messaging, and tagging and untagging.

Twitter should be the go-to social network for businesses. Although Facebook tops the list of social networks individuals would choose to pay for, Twitter tops the list respondents would advise businesses to pay for (45 percent). LinkedIn follows at 21 percent, YouTube scored highest for 19 percent, and Facebook trailed at 15 percent.

Some companies are getting social media right. Respondents named businesses that were doing the best job with social media: The most popular choices are Zappos, CNN, Comcast (“Comcast Cares”), JetBlue, Dell, Burger King, NPR, New York Times and Ford..

Social networking could cool off like a once-hip restaurant. The biggest challenge seen facing social networking services is the “inevitable slide into uncoolness,” say 29 percent of respondents. This was followed by lack of advertiser interest at 15.3 percent and the inevitable spam problem at 13.4 percent.