TL;DR
Firefox Quantum isn’t your average version update or incremental feature addition release, but rather a ground-up rebuild of the browser indicating a major leap for the long-standing Chrome-competitor. It’s poised to harness the multi-core setups that are the processing standard in today’s computers.
Mozilla today just announced that the long-awaited overhaul of the base Firefox browser — called Firefox Quantum — is now finally in the beta stage, bring it extremely close to a public consumer release.
FYI: Firefox Quantum isn’t your average version update or incremental feature addition release, but a ground-up rebuild of the browser showing a major leap for the long-standing Chrome-competitor. It’s poised to harness the multi-core setups that are the processing standard in today’s computers.
Quantum will come equipped with an all-new CSS engine written in Mozilla’s Rust programming language. Unlike most other browsers, it will work in parallel across all available cores, rather than being one bulky process running on a single core.
Tabs will also see significant changes: they will be prioritized based on the order of usage and the tabs actively in-use will download and render before other background tabs. Mozilla says this will make Firefox close to 30% less RAM-hungry and significantly faster than Chrome.
What about them bugs?
In its efforts to tackle long-standing issues and bottlenecks from Firefox, The company says it has squashed around 469 bugs that hindered performance. There are some surface-level changes. Firefox Quantum looks somewhat different, thanks to the contributions of the Photon Project which takes a minimalist approach in redesigning the browser. It also looks stunning on high-DPI display screens, which is just plain exciting.
You can read more about Firefox Quantum here. Thankfully, you won’t have to wait long, as it’s got an expected release date of November 14.
For those of you who just can’t wait, the Beta build is now available and you can download it HERE, and start testing it out. It’s available for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS. For those of you who build for the web, the Developer Edition is also available to see what the innovative side of Firefox looks like.
