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

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.

5 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. I do hope... by Knightman · · Score: 1, Informative

    ..it comes with quantum memory too since the current firefox gobbles memory like a bloated app from Microsoft...

    --
    --- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
  2. Re:It challenges ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Wrong.

    Planck unit is the time required for light to travel in a vacuum a distance of 1 Planck length, which is approximately 5.39 × 10 44 s

    However in quantum mechanics a quantum is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction.

    For example, the photon is the smallest unit of energy of an electromagnetic radiation. That energy being the frequency of the radiation multiplied by Planck's constant, approx. 6.6 × 10-34 m2 kg / s.

    Try to keep up, quantum mechanics has been around for a hundred years or so already.

    But, yes, in colloquial speech the meaning of "quantum" is the reverse of it's definition in Physics.

  3. Re:But does it still leak memory like a fiend? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've been using 57 for a while now and as a 8 GB RAM user, Firefox is for me way more RAM-friendly than any Chromium based browser.

  4. Script blocking WILL work by DrYak · · Score: 5, Informative

    I use a scriptblocking extension which has to be able to interact with every "tab" to be able to actually work.

    And script blocking is probably the number 1 feature of Firefox-based browsers (this is technically impossible to achieve on Chrome according to professionnal developers).

    That's why NoScript is currently in the process of being ported to webextensions.

    Or, more precisely, Mozilla is in the process of adapting WebExtensions so that things that formely required XUL like NoScript could be ported.

    So, unlike Google Chrome, it's very likely that either your favorite script blocking extension will eventually work on Mozilla, or you'll find a nice alternative to your taste.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  5. Tried the beta by JohnFen · · Score: 4, Informative

    I tried the beta, and I have to say... it's not as terrible as I feared.

    Personally, I honestly couldn't care less about the performance increases (I'm sure they're there, but I didn't notice them). I was concerned about two things:

    1) That there wouldn't be NoScript. There currently isn't -- and that's why I'm not yet going to use the Beta as anything but a curiosity -- but apparently there will be. Assuming that no features will be lost in the port, that will be a showstopper removed.

    2) That the UI was going to be unfixably horrible. I absolutely detest the current UI of Firefox (and Chrome), but I could fix the problem with Firefox by using Classic Theme Restorer -- an extension that can't be ported to the new plugin scheme.

    My fear was that Firefox would keep a similar UI as it had been using, but without any way of fixing it. That would be a showstopper. But, as it turns out, the Beta UI is much improved, and I can fix the things that I still find irritating using the built-in options. So I'm happy.

    I may be able to stay with Firefox after all! And that makes me even happier.