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Mozilla's 'Firefox Quantum' Browser Challenges Chrome In Speed (cnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the pound-for-pound dept.

The next version of Firefox, aptly named Firefox Quantum, is getting a big speed boost. "The idea, of course, is that the upcoming version 57 is a quantum leap over predecessors -- or, in the words of Mozilla CEO Chris Beard, a 'big bang,'" reports CNET. While Mozilla stopped short of declaring victory over Chrome, Nick Nguyen, vice president of Firefox product, said Firefox Quantum's page-load speed "is often perceivably faster" while using 30 percent less memory. From the report: The new Firefox revamp includes lots of under-the-covers improvements, like Quantum Flow, which stamps out dozens of performance bugs, and Quantum CSS, aka Stylo, which speeds up website formatting. More obvious from the outside is a new interface called Photon that wipes out Firefox's rounded tabs and adds a "page action" menu into the address bar. It also builds in the Pocket bookmarking service Mozilla acquired and uses it to recommend sites you might be interested in. A screenshot tool generates a website link so you can easily share what you see by email or Twitter. Mozilla even simplified the Firefox logo, a fox wrapping itself around the globe. More improvements are in the pipeline for later Firefox versions, too, including Quantum Render, which should speed up Firefox's ability to paint web pages onto your screen.

6 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. It challenges ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... but until observed it both wins and loses.

  2. Re:No article about the Slashdot outage? by sheramil · · Score: 4, Funny

    It wasn't an "outage", it was an "unscheduled hiatus".

  3. "Aptly named" Quantum? OK, MozColonSlashSlashA... by ToTheStars · · Score: 5, Funny

    Here's what I think when I hear "Firefox Quantum":

    • It is an incremental advancement by the smallest possible fundamental unit. (Surely that would be Firefox 56.0.1?)
    • If I run it on a headless box, it will remain in a superposition of states of "crashed" and "not crashed" until I connect the monitor, at which point its wavefunction will collapse into one state or the other (with ~20/80 odds).
    • I'll either like it but not be able to explain why it works, or I'll dislike it but be unable to disprove its merits.

    (To be clear, I do like the interface better than Chrome's, although I'll reserve judgement until I see how it handles large numbers of tabs -- my key criterion: don't shrink them to slits. I hear that there's an ad blocker around, but I hope that something like RequestPolicy will also exist in the new addon system.)

  4. Re:So... by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 3, Funny

    They have Rust on their side, which reportedly allows them to make highly parallel data structures with a complexity nearly impossible to make safely in C++ or Go. This gives them an edge.

    +5 funny.

  5. Re:Sheeple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I find your ideas both intriguing and boring and would like to both subscribe and unsubscribe from your quantum newsletter.

  6. Re:Sheeple by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 4, Funny

    Thank you. Your email was removed from our mailing list and added to the mailing lists of 500 of our clients.

    --
    #DeleteFacebook