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Mozilla Announces Quantum, a New Browser Engine For Firefox (softpedia.com)

Posted by msmash on from the Firefox-delights dept.

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.

56 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Mozilla has a new browser engine... by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 5, Funny

    Mozilla has a new browser engine, "quantum"

    That gives me solace.

    --
    "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    1. Re:Mozilla has a new browser engine... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      So the next browser will be nothing more than a bad sequel?

    2. Re:Mozilla has a new browser engine... by malditaenvidia · · Score: 1

      You seem displeased. I guess with some people, The World is Not Enough.

    3. Re:Mozilla has a new browser engine... by justthinkit · · Score: 1

      I'm leaning toward uncertainty, on principle.

      --
      I come here for the love
    4. Re:Mozilla has a new browser engine... by ChrisMaple · · Score: 1

      At least it's not coming From Russia, With Love.

      --
      Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
    5. Re:Mozilla has a new browser engine... by lsatenstein · · Score: 1

      Is it that Firefox and GeCko were written with internet speeds of 10megabytes (100megabits) per second, and with new higher speeds being demanded, that much more code has to be written at the C/C++ level, and less as java/javascript interpreter? If I can download a 5 gig file at a gig per second, then I would expect that downloads would be an entire set of pages, rather than small one page at a time of presentation. Perhaps browsers and web designers should plan what each has to do when speeds increase by a factor of 100.

      --
      Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
  2. Sounds like a disaster in the making by somenickname · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So, the idea is to replace the working but "ancient" code with stuff that is currently considered alpha quality software? In the next year? For a project the size of Firefox? That certainly doesn't sound like a recipe for success.

    1. Re:Sounds like a disaster in the making by pavon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Sounds like a disaster in the making by thegarbz · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Based on the way Firefox runs, they are replacing alpha quality code with alpha quality code.

      But frankly they can do whatever they want. I abandoned them early this year when their update broke. Not a plugin or anything specific but just everything. Update ran and "Not responding", restart ... "Not responding". Reboot the computer "Not responding". Installed Pale Moon, migrated my profile across and purge that piece of shit from my system.

    3. Re:Sounds like a disaster in the making by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Hi Asa.

      Your astroturfing is doing nothing to slow down people's abandoning of Firefox.

    4. Re:Sounds like a disaster in the making by swalve · · Score: 1

      Define "working" in this case.

  3. Re:"Quantum" by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Funny

    No, it refers to the unpredictability of the results.

    --
    No sig today...
  4. Re:Duality my ... by Alain+Williams · · Score: 1

    Quantum is designed to work on multi-core CPUs; so, presumably, you won't know exactly where parts of the DOM are rendered but know exactly how fast they are rendered -- or is that the other way round ?

  5. why? by thygate · · Score: 1, Insightful

    what happened to "don't fix it, if it aint broken" .. what is so bad about the current engine then ?

    1. Re:why? by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It has a removable battery, and a headphone jack. You can't have those in a modern Web 3.0 Internet of Things Cloud based web browser engine, that's soooo 2015.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    2. Re:why? by The-Ixian · · Score: 2

      I am pretty sure that Mozilla is widely considered to be the least secure of all the major web browsers.

      New, of course, doesn't necessarily mean better or even more secure. But the world of web browsers is one area that has changed and continues to evolve rapidly. I can completely understand wanting to scrap it all and start over. That is what MS did with Edge.... arguably it is a better browser than IE, but it is now also incompatible with everything that has gone before.

      I still love Mozilla and will continue to use it for its amazing extensibility but I can understand if more modern security practices are used to make a fresh engine.

      There will be some pain involved, for sure. But I think that Mozilla is needed in this industry. I am not ready to give all my cookies to Google or MS.

      --
      My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
    3. Re:why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Really? In what ways is Firefox less secure than Chrome or MSIE/Edge? The latter two cannot even be audited.

    4. Re:why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      They're not actually building a new browser engine, much less calling it Quantum. This is an internal project name (project, not product!).

      If I understand correctly, they've been experimenting with Servo, a browser engine they've built using the Rust programming language. Rust aims for speed, concurrency and safety, which is highly desirable but hard to achieve on modern (multi-cpu/multi-core) devices using conventional programming languages.

      Now their plan is to gradually replace bits and pieces of Gecko (the current rendering engine) with parts from Servo. This is a process they already started and which will take some time to complete. Some of the benefits are already present in their nightly browser builds, others at least sound very promising.

      If you want to learn more about the project and/or the resulting transition, take a look at these articles (the post at softpedia is quite misleading IMHO):
      - https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a3b7174b3c12#.s4zttcbxe
      - https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/mozillas-quantum-project/

      (I hope this helps to clear up some of the confusion)

    5. Re:why? by DrXym · · Score: 2
      Firefox is built around a mostly single threaded CPU renderer. Servo tries to push as much rendering and other stuff onto the GPU and uses Rust to enforce concurrency meaning the frame rate is higher and it should be stable too. That said, the web is full of quirky / broken content and that's where the effort goes to ensure the new browser works with the existing content.

      But this isn't a new phenomena. Mozilla / Firefox developed from a project called NGLayout (next generation layout) which was developed to replace the engine in Netscape 4.x. The NGLayout engine was a LOT faster than it's predecessor but it still took several years before it became a viable replacement. It wasn't until about Mozilla 0.7 that it could be considered on par with what it was replacing.

    6. Re:why? by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      That is what MS did with Edge.... arguably it is a better browser than IE, but it is now also incompatible with everything that has gone before.

      If you mean "incompatible with IE 6.0" then that's a good thing.

      Edge is Microsoft finally starting to support the same standards as the rest of the world.

      --
      No sig today...
    7. Re:why? by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      Cite: https://html5test.com/results/...

      --
      No sig today...
    8. Re:why? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      don't fix it, if it aint broken

      Sigh they have a lot of work to do then.

    9. Re:why? by The-Ixian · · Score: 1

      https://it.slashdot.org/story/...

      AFAIK, Firefox only just recently introduced sandboxing in their general release, something which the other browsers have had for a while.

      Honestly, this may just be a perception thing. I just know what I have heard from various people. I am not a security expert by any means.

      --
      My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
    10. Re:why? by The-Ixian · · Score: 1

      >> I am pretty sure that Mozilla is widely considered to be the least secure of all the major web browsers.
      >Huh?! How so? I beg to differ...
      I was referring to things I have heard on various podcasts. I also know that Firefox is behind the curve on some browser security techniques like sandboxing.
      Also, Firefox was excluded earlier this year from the 2016 pwn2own competition on the grounds that it was "too easy" to find privilege escalations. Though, I have no idea if that is because of the rendering engine or what.

      >> I can completely understand wanting to scrap it all and start over.
      >But that's not what they're doing (or intending to do). They'll try to improve those parts they think should be and can be improved.
      >On the other hand, that's actually what they did *most* of the time during the last 18.5 years, I think.
      I stand corrected

      >> Edge.... arguably it is a better browser than IE, but it is now also incompatible with everything that has gone before.
      >I'd second that it's much better than IE. It's also much more evolved. But it's not incompatible with *everything* that's gone before. That just isn't true.
      You are right, I was making a sweeping statement there about Edge being incompatible with everything that has gone before.

      What I was thinking specifically are group policies and extensions (add-ons). Which is quite a bit in a corporate environment.

      --
      My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
    11. Re:why? by Ghostworks · · Score: 4, Informative

      There have been a lot of moving pieces to the Firefox project.
      * First, the code base was meant to be universal, with options to support a range of OSes and hardware. This involves a lot of not-so-sexy problems like word size, address space, endian-ness, etc. that don't come up a lot anymore. It also has it's own home-made (pseudo)thread system, because some of those supported OSes did not have nativemultithread capabilities. Since this is at the base of all code, things higher up have a lot of clunky support code.
      * To make this all work, everything is modular with defined interfaces. This takes more memory, but makes for a more stable yet versatile design.
      * Firefox was meant to be a lightweight version of the Mozilla browser. (Time makes fools of us all.) The idea was that CSS and javascript could be used to build out your UI as if it were a webpage.
      * Building on that, since this chrome layer was never hard-coded anyway, it makes it easy to re-write with extension code. In fact, the extensions can do damn near anything by interfacing with gecko modules directly (or by building their own).

      Now the problems:
      * The Gecko engine is basically functional, but was never designed to do a lot of the goofy crap modern Web API standards are pushing forward. (Web API is basically aiming to make your browser into a universal interface for your entire computer. That way "web apps" have access to all the resources they could possibly need... though, sadly, almost no thought seems to have been given to making it secure.)
      * Gecko is also way too bulky to ever work on a mobile phone, which is how a lot of the web is being consumed now. They had to fork and rewrite code to get out a workable android version.
      * The extensions that did more than change the display meant that you either couldn't change internal interfaces, or that doing so would break everything. The way the chrome code was written meant that changing it would often break theme add-ons. Most of the time this just leads to angry users and people who refuse to update. But it also leads to a lot of bugs filed and support requests that ultimately stem from badly-coded, out-of-date extensions screwing everything up. Mozilla mostly considers this a perception problem, since the browser seems to be more broken because of the extensions.
      * Firefox had a lot of preferences. These could all be edited at runtime, and took up a lot of memory with the properties themselves, and with the branch logic needed to support some of them.
      * Firefox has been very leaky on a per-tab memory basis.

      So where have they been going:
      * legacy OSes and architectures aren't supported. Not enough horsepower to actually make the modern web work on, say, BeOS.
      * Mozilla threads are deprecated in favor of real multithreading done through OS API calls.
      * They've gone to a Google Chrome-like model for extensions, where there's a general extension API. They're open to expanding it however is necessary to get extensions with large market share -- such as NoScript and Firebug -- to work, but at some point we can expect that there are things they just have no interest in adding in.
      * They've been trimming preferences release after release. There's not even anything to turn off javascript now unless you have an extension. (The logic is that the modern web is basically un-digestable without javascript.)

    12. Re:why? by MrL0G1C · · Score: 1

      "Access to webcam", "Screen Capture", "speech recognition", WTF? HTML5 is the security services/hackers/stalkers wet dream.

      https://html5test.com/index.ht...

      I don't want Firefox getting full marks, that's a bad thing.

      --
      Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
    13. Re:why? by epine · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the summary. Reminds me of old times ...

  6. All about the developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:All about the developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You stopped supporting Firefox because they changed the appearance of the menu? That's a strange priority. And the old-style menu is still there, I use it all the time.

    2. Re:All about the developers by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 1

      I am not sure if that is entirely true of Firefox. It is true, however, of the desktop environments that are being pushed for Linux, to wit, Gnome, KDE and Unity. Fortunately, they are not getting any traction.

    3. Re:All about the developers by plenTpak · · Score: 1

      I like Firefox because it's the most customizeable! I put the menu right back where it belongs! And the status bar, square tabs, light-on-dark, etc.

    4. Re:All about the developers by cheesybagel · · Score: 2

      Try pressing the ALT key.

  7. Ship of Theseus by pavon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes and No. It is an effort to make a new browser engine, starting with Gecko and slowly replacing parts of it until none of Gecko remains. In the sort term it can be considered an improvement of Gecko, but in the long run will be a whole new engine.

    1. Re:Ship of Theseus by Woldscum · · Score: 1

      Should have named it Borg

    2. Re:Ship of Theseus by lgw · · Score: 2

      Theseus's ship?

      The history of the band Yes is a much better example these days. What happens if you replace band members one by one until none of the original band members remain? And their music sounds nothing like the original (but gradually evolved to the new sound, as most bands do)? And the original band members form a new band? OK, now what if both bands do a joint tour, effectively forming one big band again?

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    3. Re:Ship of Theseus by PCM2 · · Score: 1

      So you're saying Quantum sounds like shit. (walks off whistling)

      --
      Breakfast served all day!
    4. Re:Ship of Theseus by lgw · · Score: 1

      OK, you lost me. Quantum, the Brazilian prog rock band? Quantum the album by Planet X? I actually checked to see if more of Dream Theater had played on that album.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    5. Re:Ship of Theseus by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      Yes doesn't have any original members left, but they do have one member, Steve Howe, who was with the band during its primary creative peak - the period from The Yes Album through Tales from Topographic Oceans.

      As for the original members forming a new band, the closest thing we've got right now is Anderson, Rabin, and Wakefield (aka ARW). Only one of them, Rick Wakefield, is an original member. But they are currently doing a tour where they primarily perform classic Yes songs, and probably do sound more like early Yes than the current band does.

      So far as I know, there are no plans for Yes and ARW to tour together. But it would be amazing if they did!

    6. Re: Ship of Theseus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Actually, Rick Wakeman isn't an original member, he first joined Yes for it's fourth album, Fragile. Tony Kaye is Yes' original keyboardist, having been the first three albums (Including The Yes Album), then returned for their big breakout album, entitled 90125, in the 80s and three albums after that, with 1994's Talk as his curtain call with the band.

      Geoff Downes, the current Yes keyboardist, perhaps better known as an original member of both the Buggles ("Video Killed the Radio Star") and Asia, is in striking distance of having had more time behind the Yes keyboard (in terms of tour dates) than Wakeman, which would relegate Wakeman to 3rd in concerts played behind Kaye and Downes.

      People remember Wakeman as "the" Yes keyboardist because he had the cape and was sort of a big personality who was famous in his own right for other music in England, and happened to be around for maybe the best attended US tours of the 70s (Which were dwarfed by the attendence during 80s concerts and tours, but perhaps better remembered by the generation of fans that "made" Yes as an important band- personally, I loved the 80s stuff, though). They forget that he wasn't an original member of the band, quit *twice* in the 70s, returned briefly in 1991 and 1996, and then quit again.

      I saw the current Yes in both 2015 and 2016, and they still perform a great show. I think this is in part *because* they have a dynamic lineup that's changed over the years. Jon Davision, the current lead singer, at 40 is much better than Jon Anderson at 70 post serious respitory problems- new Jon can hit notes old Jon no longer can and sing them in their original key (Not saying that original Jon at 40 wasn't better than new Jon is at 40, but we can't bring out a time machine and transport a 40 year old old Jon, so only one of them is 40 today ;) ). Billy Sherwood is an incredible bass player and harmony guy (Also a prolific writer and performer of new music- he winds up with like 3 new studio albums a year between his solo stuff and all the other bands and projects he's involved with like Circa:, World Trade, Prog Collective, etc.. Hoping he'll get big input into a new Yes studio album). Billy was also literally handpicked by Chris Squire, the band's bass player on every studio album to date, who passed away last year, to replace him. Geoff Downes is a living legend (Perhaps more for his work outside of Yes than in it, granted), and Steve Howe, of course, is a legend himself, voted best guitarist in the world five years in a row in the 70s by Guitar Player's magazine, having first debuted with Yes in, I think, 1971. Technically, Alan White is the drummer, having done it continiously since the early 70s when Bill Bruford left, 40 years plus- I say technically because he's been out of action following a back surgery, replaced temporarily by Jay Schellen, who I almost hate to admit sounded better on the kit in 2016, thab White in 2015 (Hesitant to admit, because White is one of my favorite musicians- kind of hoping they'll keep two drummers if he recovers enough to be on stage, the legend we want to see and applaud, and the lesser known guy who is in top form musicially in the present, best of both worlds).

      Anyway, would definitely recommend going to see the real Yes with the official name over the ARW thing with the three former members. The band with the name that continues to this day puts on a much better show in 2016, and is pretty ambitious in its set lists. The show I saw included the Drama album in its entirety, two sides of Tales from the Topographic Oceans (sides 1 and 4 off the double album) with a bit of the third side to bridge the gap, and some greatest hits type material.

  8. What about the Chrome engine? by Nunya666 · · Score: 1

    So is this in addition to, or instead of, cloning the Chrome engine?

    As long as it runs every popular existing add-in, I would give it a try. If not, then it will become just another contributor to the death of Mozilla.

    1. Re:What about the Chrome engine? by The-Ixian · · Score: 1

      I think they were only talking about making the extension API's similar to Chrome.... or maybe I am wrong.

      I don't think that Mozilla has ever had or planned to have a Webkit rendering engine.

      --
      My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
  9. Naming? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Not sure their choice of name for the new engine and the project to transition to it was all that well thought out.

    Britons who were alive in the 1980s or just happen to be knowledgeable on the subject of Clive Sinclair's foray into home computers will probably remember the Sinclair QL, or Quantum Leap as it was also known as. This was a machine that was introduced to the public before they had a single working prototype and pushed into production several months before it was ready for that. The result was almost biblical unreliability and just a plain shoddy product they never really ironed out all the issues of despite multiple delays in production causing it to ship behind schedule and in low numbers.

    1. Re:Naming? by Stormwatch · · Score: 2

      But see the upside, the Sinclair QL led to the creation of Linux!

      True story, young Linus Torvalds cut his teeth on coding for the QL. More precisely, he had to write his own software because the QL flopped so hard that it had zero commercial support, and he couldn't afford a new machine.

      --
      Circumcision is child abuse.
  10. Re:Will it have memory leaks? by somenickname · · Score: 1

    Servo is written in Rust so, it will have no memory leaks, no security problems and is so fast that even bubble sort can be implemented in O(N).

  11. Re:By the end of 2017 by ArtemaOne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Then you can stick to the ones mining all of your data.

  12. Re:Will it have memory leaks? by Rufty · · Score: 1

    It will have memory leaks, but if you measure how fast memory leaks you won't be able to tell where the leak is.

    --
    Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
  13. Forget memory leaks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    How about CPU leaks? On my machine, firefox starts by using less than 10% CPU when idle, and throughout the course of a day, gradually increases until it's more than 50% CPU. At idle. No, I'm not kidding.

    1. Re:Forget memory leaks by stephanep · · Score: 1

      This is so true !

      I can throw more memory at the problem to mitigate memory leaks... But whatever CPU I get, CPU leaks will still burn a bit of uranium in my country, cost me a few euros every years, or reduce the time I can use surf on a laptop.

      On a more positive note "about:performance" is a really cool idea against that (but not always effective when tab and add-on is flagged as "perform well" but CPU still leaks)

  14. Makes sense by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    They're having a really hard time weaning plugin devs and their users off the old single threaded stuff. My own plugin is going to need a complete and complicated rewrite when they finally force the issue and I'm not sure I'm up to it. I might just move it to Chrome and call it a day...

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  15. Re:"Quantum" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    No, it refers to both, depending upon how it is observed.

  16. More info by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    There's a bit more info and actual insight here: https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/mozillas-quantum-project/

  17. Re:Will it have memory leaks? by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

    Servo is written in Rust so, it will have no memory leaks, no security problems and is so fast that even bubble sort can be implemented in O(N).

    Will there at least be an add-on that will simulate memory leaks?

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  18. Re:Will it have memory leaks? by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

    It will have memory leaks, but if you measure how fast memory leaks you won't be able to tell where the leak is.

    I think that's the engine written in that new language called "Heisenberg". Actually, I'm not sure if it's been written yet or not- it compiles but every time I go to look for the executable it's not there.

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  19. Re:Will it have memory leaks? by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    Actually bubble sort IS O(N) for the particular case of sorting an already sorted list. Which happens more often than you would think it does...

  20. How big is a "Quantum Leap"? by phrackthat · · Score: 1

    How did "Quantum Leap" come to mean a large change? I mean, in physics the word "quantum" means "The smallest possible, and therefore indivisible, unit of a given quantity or quantifiable phenomenon." Smallest. Not largest. I suppose some could argue from quantum entanglement and "spooky action at a distance" that large distances can be a play, but quantum entanglement didn't really enter the public's collective conscience until the mid-200s with the quantum teleportation stories and the term "quantum leap" used as an indicator of radical or massive change far pre-dates those stories.

  21. Re:By the end of 2017 by allo · · Score: 1

    Mozilla does enough tracking with firefox as well. Have a look at ffprofile.com for what actually happens (and how to disable it).