Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Announces Quantum, a New Browser Engine For Firefox (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla is currently working on a new browser engine called Quantum, which will take parts from the Servo project and create a new core for the Firefox browser. The new engine will replace the aging Gecko, Firefox' current engine. Mozilla hopes to finish the transition to Quantum (as in Quantum Leap) by the end of 2017. The first versions of Quantum will heavily rely on components from Servo, a browser engine that Mozilla has been sponsoring for the past years, and which shipped its first alpha version this June. In the upcoming year, Mozilla will slowly merge Gecko and Servo components with each new release, slowly removing Gecko's ancient code, and leaving Quantum's engine in place.
The developers are getting bored, just like they did with the perfectly functional and logical "ancient" menu-based interface. Firefox stopped developing for the users around the time they released version 4.0. From the point on, it's been all about the developers. They're developing for themselves, not me, and that's why I no longer have a preference for browsers, and no longer advocate firefox.
The Servo engine as a whole is alpha, and still has a lot of catching up to do to implement an entire modern browser engine. However, some of it's components are more mature than others, and the code that is there is faster and more robust than the old Gecko code. The idea with Quantum is that rather than waiting for an entire brand new engine to be reimplemented from scratch (Servo) they will be keeping most of Gecko and slowly replacing components of it with new code from Servo, doing the necessary work to bring those components to production quality in the process.