Continuing its steady recovery, Mozilla has unveiled its big browser overhaul dubbed Firefox Quantum. Progressing on from Firefox 52, Quantum is two times faster and designed to make use of multi-core systems.
Firefox Quantum was announced last year, making use of technology from the Servo research project. This has allowed the new browser to tout itself as being twice as fast as its predecessor while “often [being] faster than Chrome, while consuming roughly 20 percent less RAM.”
These figures are to be taken with a slight pinch of salt, however, as tests were conducted by Mozilla's new Speedometer 2.0 open source benchmarking tool.
“This improved utilization of your computer's hardware makes Firefox Quantum dramatically faster,” claims Mozilla. “One example: we've developed a breakthrough approach to laying out pages: a super fast CSS engine written in Rust, a systems programming language that Mozilla pioneered. Firefox's new CSS engine runs quickly, in parallel across multiple CPU cores, instead of running in one slower sequence on a single core. No other browser can do this.”
Mozilla has managed to fix over 468 issues in its “browser-wide initiative to zap any instances of slowness you might encounter while using Firefox.” Firefox is also receiving a facelift, with its user inferface being overhauled as a part of Mozilla's Project Photon, allowing the browser to utilise high-resolution screens.
Firefox Quantum is currently in beta on desktop, iOS and Android with a release date set for November 14th. Developers can also get in on the action before its release too.
KitGuru Says: Given the popularity shift from Internet Explorer to Chrome, I wouldn't be surprised if it's Mozilla's turn on the throne given all of the improvements made. Chrome is still a bit of a resource hog, especially for those working with multiple tabs on a regular basis, so count me in on trialling Quantum. Will you be making the switch?
will it eat 50gig of memory and spam over 100 firefix.exe proccess at the same time too ???
Chrome is the new internet explorer, it is inevitable to fail in the same traps IE did before him.
On the other hand firefox is giving me it’s fair amount of trouble lately, and sometimes I fire up Edge to get the job done, but in developer side Edge is…. well there is not, it doesn’t have any developer tools at all.
Multicore support intrigues me. Chrome is a pain when you are browsing websites with loads of photos
Well in my testing RAM usage is dramatically improved comparing to previous versions but is still above chrome. CPU usage wise it was light on resources, depending on the page you load.
But as it is totally new grounds up builds 99% of addons are incompatible as of the beta release. only ghostery and ad block seem to work with few others.
There’s something wrong with your system then
Firefox rarley uses more then one or two processes
No he’s afraid Firefox becomes like chrome, which already do this, as chrome.exe