Mozilla Launches Firefox Quantum, A Ridiculously Fast Browser

Mozilla, the creators of the ever popular browser among the open source community has released an incredible new update to the Firefox browser called the ‘Firefox Quantum‘. It is still in its beta stages and will be officially rolled out on the 14th of November, 2017. It isn’t just another incremental update to Firefox but this is going to be a game changer for Firefox and its competitors, especially Google Chrome. With Project Quantum, Mozilla is actively upping its game on many fronts. It is all set to grab back its market share from Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

Changes to Web Engine

With this incredible update, Firefox will now be able to take advantage and harness the power of your multi-core devices. That is, it can now work in parallel across cores rather than as one large process on a single core. It is also being shipped with an all-new super fast Quantum CSS engine (aka Stylo) fully written in Mozilla’s Rust programming language.

Mozilla also promises that this new Quantum browser will use your RAM thirty percent more efficiently than Chrome,  thanks to their new tab prioritization technology – active tabs are now downloaded and rendered before moving on to the background tabs. Not only this, they have also fixed 468 other issues, both small paper-cuts and big bottlenecks that had been plaguing Firefox for a long time.

Changes to User Interface

Firefox Quantum also looks completely different from the previous generations of Firefox, thanks to their adoption of minimalism via Project Photon. Firefox Quantum is a modern, intuitive and really fast browser which makes you feel its speed – you can literally feel the difference when using it. Changes include but are not limited to redesigned menus, square tabs, glassy-smooth animations and a new ‘Library’ button that acts as a single place for your bookmarks, downloads, history, etc. It also looks good on high DPI displays which have an increased pixel density compared to standard DPI displays (like the modern 4K resolution monitors).

Even Google Chrome looks less modern and outdated in front of Firefox Quantum.

Conclusion

If you are really interested in testing it out and can’t wait until the 14th of November, you can straight away download the beta here. It is available for Windows (32-bit & 64-bit), macOS, and Linux (32-bit & 64-bit). A special Developer Edition is also available for people who build the web and require power tools.

UPDATE: Firefox Quantum is officially out and available for anyone to download from their homepage. Alternatively, you can grab it from Google Play or App Store for your mobile devices.