Firefox Quantum- ready to challenge the might of Chrome.

Firefox Quantum

If you are a regular Internet user, most of you must be using Google Chrome ( myself included) but if you follow carefully, Mozilla Firefox was one of the fastest growing browsers in the early 2000s but gradually it's user share waned over the years as Chrome and Safari picked pace. It does not mean Mozilla remained dormant with it's flagship browser, Firefox and is now ready to shake the market with it's revolutionary or as the company states "Quantum" Firefox. It has made a lot of improvements which is almost like a quantum leap for the company but let's see how well it may fare against the mighty Chrome.

Firefox 57, is the official name of the dubbed "Quantum" browser because of the magnitude of changes that the company has brought from revamping the UI of the browser to doing a lot of under the hood changes. This has resulted in almost doubling the speed as compared to it's last year's Firefox 52.

Firefox Quantum is about 2X faster than Firefox was a year ago!

This is the result of the Speedometer 2.0 benchmark where Firefox Quantum performed much faster than it's own predecessor which is great. Firefox, now relies on a new revamped rendering engine, in particular, a new CSS ( cascading style sheets) engine, written with Rust, the language which originated at Mozilla's research group. This enables Firefox to make full utilization of the modern hardware culminating in it's significant speed improvements.

Firefox has historically run mostly on just one CPU core, but Firefox Quantum takes advantage of multiple CPU cores in today's desktop and mobile devices much more effectively

 The use of it's own programming language, Rust is also one of the new features of Firefox. The browser's CSS engine has been rewritten in the systems coding lingo to be both faster and better able to multi-thread. Rust aims to be a memory safe, concurrent and fast alternative to C. We're big fans of Rust here: it's a secure, thread-friendly and elegant evolution of C/C++.

On the UI front, Firefox has done a pretty good job of ---finally--- adopting the minimalistic standard that Google has set for the industry resulting in less clutter at the top and an optional search bar now. Furthermore, it has built-in Pocket support which Mozilla bought earlier this year.

Firefox Quantum VS Others

Mozilla has it's eyes clearly set now- get the market share back and beat the market leading Chrome by being faster and 30% less RAM then the memory-hungry Chrome. The mission of Mozilla seems clean and straight- beat Chrome at it's own game. I'm very excited about the Firefox Quantum. If it can deliver what it promises, I would love to switch to a less-memory hungry browser---with ease.

What do you feel about the Firefox Quantum? Will you replace Chrome for Quantum ? Tell us in the comments below.