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posted by mrpg on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the my-extensions-dont-work dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @10:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @10:30AM (#598131)

    In my experience, any time Mozilla announces that a new version of Firefox is faster, it means that the time between freezing is shorter. Which can technically be considered faster, it moves faster from one freeze to the next.

    Last time it became "faster" was when they moved everything over to SQLite, and this update is not supposed to do anything about that, so I guess it just mean that some other thing has become "faster" this time.