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Quantum-Feature

Mozilla has been fighting a losing boxing against Google Chrome for the past few years. Firefox'southward share of the browser market has shrunk dramatically, its once-dominant position chewed down to a minority. All versions of Firefox currently take a 9.1 percentage market share, below IE + Edge and Safari. Now, Mozilla has unveiled a new version of their web browser that they promise will rejuvenate their efforts in this area: Firefox Quantum.

Firefox-Market

Mozilla isn't pulling its PR punches. The system claims that Firefox Quantum is twice as fast as Firefox from vi months ago, congenital with brand-new technology running native 64-scrap, all while using 30 percent less RAM than the competition (read: Chrome). Everything from the UI (now codenamed Photon) to the underlying browser engine (Servo) has been congenital new, from the ground upwardly. The new engine has been parallelized and should be essentially faster, and Mozilla believes it can apply its new Servo engine to enable capabilities like mixed-reality support far more easily than would've been possible in the old version.

According to a blog mail service, Mozilla's yr-long overhaul changed or added over 11 million lines of code, though it's not articulate if "inverse" includes "deleted" (presumably it does). The company said 369 bugs related to performance and responsiveness have been fixed, forth with 1,190 software bugs "related to the user experience."

UI comparing between FF55 (Left) and Breakthrough (Right).

The ane matter I don't really like about Breakthrough is the browser'due south diminished UI gradients, as shown in the prototype in a higher place. I have never liked Microsoft's determination to comprehend a slope-free future; information technology makes it harder to navigate options, not easier. Information technology's one reason I have no plans to upgrade to after versions of Part (that, and Office 2010 works perfectly for what I demand it for).

We intended to have our own benchmark suite to testify, merely my attempts to run some tests on my ain system ran into snags. Firefox refused to differentiate properly between two dissimilar versions of the browser, even when we consulted guides on dual-browser setup. Our sis site, PCMag, had better luck: Here's what information technology reported for overall performance:

On the Speedometer criterion, the pre-Quantum Firefox release scored 45, compared with 70 for Firefox Breakthrough. JetStream is one of the virtually thorough JavaScript benchmarks around, incorporating tests from Google'southward Octane and the WebKit Sunspider benchmark. Firefox Quantum scored 151 on JetStream compared with 144 for Google Chrome.

Our own initial tests on Quantum confirm that information technology feels snappier, though maybe not as much as we'd take seen under different circumstances. I deleted my old Firefox profile a few months back and created a new i, in an attempt to troubleshoot some bug I was having. Information technology actually worked wonders for the browser's overall performance level, but that means I'm not seeing much in the way of big gains at the moment. Nevertheless, Quantum seems to be a footstep forward for the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox itself. Hopefully that momentum will translate into increased market share and better contest for Chrome.