Mozilla recently released Firefox Quantum, and even if you long ago switched to Google Chrome, it’s worth giving the browser upgrade a spin.
Firefox Quantum is really fast, Firefox Quantum(57) is over twice as fast as Firefox(52) from 6 months ago, built on a completely overhauled core engine with brand new technology, and graced with a beautiful new look designed to get out of the way and let you do what you do best: surf a ton of pages, open a zillion tabs, all guilt free because Firefox Quantum uses less memory than any other competition in market and your machine will thank you for this.
Second, Firefox has an important role to play if you care about the value of the web as neutral tech territory — a place free of the control Apple and Google exert over our phones and the apps we can run on them.
Mozilla’s mission is to keep the web open and competitive, and Firefox is how Mozilla works to endow the web with new technology like easier payments, virtual reality, and fast WebAssembly-powered games.
“Their mission is a good one and does keep the pressure up to keep the web open,” Gartner analyst David Smith said. He recommended web surfers use “multiple modern browsers.”
It’s by far the biggest update Firefox had since it’s launch in 2004, it’s just flat out better in every way. The first thing you’ll notice is the speed. Go on, open some tabs and have some fun. The second thing you’ll notice is the brand new User Interface (UI). The new Photon UI itself is incredibly fast and smooth. Google’s Chrome is now the most-used browser by far, and Mozilla has largely been sidelined when it comes to phones and tablets. Firefox Quantum, a complete overhaul of the browser that took more than a year’s work to achieve, is an attempt to start fresh.
Even if Firefox Quantum delivers that kind of speed boost, success won’t be easy pie for them because it’s hard to get people to change browsers. Firefox accounts for around 6 percent of browser usage today compared with 58 percent for Chrome and 14 percent for Apple’s Safari. Narrowing it just to personal computers — Mozilla’s primary focus for the Quantum upgrade — Firefox has 12 % to Chrome’s 64 % in world PC market.
Making Firefox look, feel and perform faster was no small feat. Employees and volunteers from around the world worked in record time to create the best Firefox yet.
The New Firefox Quantum By the Numbers
- More than 700 authors contributed code to Firefox since the August 6th release.
- 80 contributors from all over the world, with nearly every time-zone represented in round-the-clock awesomeness!
- There are 265,252,859,191,742,656,903,069,040,640,000 more ways to customize the new Firefox toolbar right out of the box!
There’s more that could be said about all the amazing work that went into Quantum, or about some of the exciting stuff in the very near future, but at this point, you should stop reading and download Firefox Quantum, because it will make you happy and feel speed.
