Firefox Quantum is brand new and FAST

Firefox has just gotten a massive update and has trotted out Quantum, the latest version that is touted to be twice as fast as the previous one. It sports a new CSS engine that’s optimized to take advantage of multi-core processors and has a sleek minimalist UI design.

Dubbed ‘Photon’, FireFox Quantum’s new interface is a real stylistic fling from their original designs. Mozilla has tried to modernize the appearance of their updated browser while keeping to the Firefox spirit – adaptable, quick and whimsical.

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The core of Firefox Quantum

At the heart of Firefox Quantum is Stylo, a CSS engine that’s based on an experimental design that they previously named Servo. Stylo supposedly takes advantage of modern hardware, parallelizing the work across all of the cores in your machine, but has combined technologies from other browsers.

The folks at Mozilla claim that based on tests, Stylo helps Quantum run up to 2 or 4 or even 18 times faster. There have also been changes that prioritize the tab you’re on, making better use of valuable system resources.

Here’s a sample of a test that Mozilla ran:

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However, speed aside, here’s a big one. Mozilla also claims that Firefox Quantum consumes roughly 30% less RAM than Chrome. For a company that’s been held hostage to claims of high RAM usage of their browser, this is something that’s bound to raise a few eyebrows.

The chart below shows a comparative memory consumption in a test, but again, these figures are from Mozilla and you may want to take them with a pinch of salt.

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Over the past few years, not much has changed in the browser space. Sure, there’s been some wishful thinking form Microsoft with Edge, but essentially the ball in still bouncing around in the same places. Will Quantum be a success? We’re not sure, but it has been intriguing enough to have a look at.

Firefox Quantum is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Either update your Firefox (if you’re already using it) or head over to Mozilla to get a copy now.

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