SoylentNews

An Anonymous Coward writes:

From Firefox's faster, slicker, slimmer Quantum edition now out

[...] Collectively, the performance work being done to modernize Firefox is called Project Quantum. We took a closer look at Quantum back when Firefox 57 hit the developer channel in September, but the short version is, Mozilla is rebuilding core parts of the browser, such as how it handles CSS stylesheets, how it draws pages on-screen, and how it uses the GPU.

This work is being motivated by a few things. First, the Web has changed since many parts of Firefox were initially designed and developed; pages are more dynamic in structure and applications are richer and more graphically intensive. JavaScript is also more complex and difficult to debug. Second, computers now have many cores and simultaneous threads, giving them much greater scope to work in parallel. And security remains a pressing concern, prompting the use of new techniques to protect against exploitation. Some of the rebuilt portions are even using Mozilla's new Rust programming language, which is designed to offer improved security compared to C++.

Also at: Firefox aims to win back Chrome users with its souped up Quantum browser

The fastest version of Firefox yet is now live

Original Submission