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.

Comments

It challenges ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

So...

[Curupira]

...THAT'S why Mozilla decided to ditch XUL (and a lot of legacy add-ons that relied on it). And it is a very important goal -- a faster and more stable Firefox was needed for a long time.

But I also hope that we soon get back most of the extensions that Firefox lost in this change. Without its previous top-notch configurability, I'm afraid it can't really compete with Google developers working on Chrome.

Re:So...

[AmiMoJo]

The problem with allowing the kind of UI altering extensions that Firefox does is that it's an insane security risk and a massive performance issue.

Add-ons run in the global browser context, with access to everything. All tabs, the UI, all the internal browser data... And interact with every random web page you visit, and every random bit of Javascript and broken HTML on them. It should be obvious that letting Javascript interact with Javascript without a proper sandbox and with access to basically everything is a terrible idea, a security nightmare.

It also blocked them from stopping everything running globally and using threads for each tab and various background processes.

The problem they have now is that no enough add-on developers care about Firefox for them to get all the existing add-ons ported. Even if they add API extensions to support some of the lost functionality, they still need the developers to do the work. I can tell you that I'm not going to bother updating my decade old add-on.

Try it before you knock it

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this is just going to be a Firefox hate fest, but give the browser a try.

The important extensions will come along. Ublock origin is here and Noscript will be at the part shortly.

"Aptly named" Quantum? OK, MozColonSlashSlashA...

[ToTheStars]

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.)

Re:How about making it start up faster

[GuB-42]

Except you don't really have a choice. Web developers put tons crap with their webpages that make it impossible to use them with a Netscape 3 era browser.
Browsers used to be document viewers, but now, they are essentially OSes.

Script blocking WILL work

[DrYak]

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.