Quick stats: it’s 2x faster than last year’s fox and uses 30% less RAM than Chrome
If you’re anything like me, you haven’t really been following the news on Mozilla. I’ve been far too busy hacking my way through The Odin Project, and sleeping 14 hours a day. I just use Firefox because it was the best alternative to Google Chrome, which I decided against because big brother and all that.
Now, Firefox 57, which has been completely re-built from the ground up, is such an improvement over any previous releases that they’ve given it a new name: Quantum. Before I get into the details of this new browser, I’m going to answer the first question on everybody’s mind –
yes, it is noticeably faster, and you should check out the beta.
The official launch date for Quantum is November 14th, 2017.
The new CSS engine is designed with features from four different browsers. It’s parallelism from Servo (Mozilla’s experimental browser) allows the CSS engine to utilize all processor cores simultaneously. It borrows the style sharing cache from Chrome and Safari. The new rule tree comes from the existing Firefox release.
Developers went through and fixed no less than 369 performance bugs, and it shows.
Pages render faster and react more organically. So if you aren’t running the latest and greatest hardware, like me, pages don’t always have the smoothest interactivity. But not anymore, comrades. Firefox Quantum is the bees knees. I like the new Photon UI, it feels like the next logical step in user interface as a whole. The start page is redesigned for more simplicity, and the color scheme is easier on my eyes.
Read more about Firefox Quantum, by Dan Callahan, developer advocate for Mozilla, for the real in-depth analysis and explanation. If you aren’t interested, at least go take the new girl on the block for a ride.
You might be surprised at how quick she can respond to your needs.