Good news for the progress of the web today as Mozilla released version 57 of its flagship product Firefox into the Beta version and Developer Edition. This means the not-for-profit is pretty much on track for release its biggest browser upgrade ever to the wider public in November.
As I blogged earlier in the month, Firefox 57 will represent a big step forward in security and performance for the ageing browser, and bring a raft of new features from its experimental browser Servo.
New Look
One of the first things you will notice about the new Firefox, is that the tabs and controls have a new look called Photon. Going with the modern ethos that simple is better, the icons have a flat mono theme, and the tabs are now square again (as per before the "Australis" update which introduced beveled tabs in 2014).
It fits in well with the design style introduced by Microsoft with Windows Phone and followed through to windows 10. Yes flat is still cool. You will also notice a line on top of the currently active tab, and a Windows 10-esque loading animation with a dot that bounces back and forth, on Windows at least.
All together it is a very polished and compact UI, and little tweaks such as an animated Stop and Refresh button show that they have want it to be a pleasure to use.
Improved Address Bar
The improved address bar aims to be more useful, as well as not giving up as much of your search data, by making better use of your history and previously inputted search terms.
There is still a separate search bar that will query search engines for suggestions, and you can use the address bar to send search queries to your favourite search engine.
Quantum
The biggest update here is the fruits of Project Quantum, Mozilla's year long project to integrate components of their experimental browser Servo into Firefox. In this release, Quantum CSS and Quantum Compositor make their way over, along with native developments Quantum Flow and Quantum DOM.
Quantum CSS a.k.a Stylo, brings multi-threading and GPU acceleration to CSS processing, and Quantum Compositor is a rewrite of the components that combines the individual elements into a full page. Both written in Mozilla's Rust language, they enable the browser to take full advantage of modern hardware.
Quantum Flow and Quantum DOM are both improvements to the existing systems, Quantum DOM improves how tabs are handled when they are running in the background so that they do not affect the performance of the currently focused window, and Flow seeks to prevent other bottlenecks from affecting page performance, and prevent those annoying hickups where for example the page freezes for a moment during animations or scrolling.
All together this adds up to a much faster and smoother experience (Up to 2 times faster), along with around 30% less memory usage.
New Developer Tools
Good developer tools are the savior of any good web developer, and Mozilla is seeking to keep us on-side by providing a completely rewritten tool. Now written in HTML and Javascript using the React framework, when this first appeared in Firefox Developer Edition, it felt like a bit of a step backward, but the latest update shows there has been significant progress.
It has better code highlighting, a new CSS Grids feature to help you inspect the structure of your page, and of course thanks to Quantum, it feels much snappier.
What's Next?
Firefox 57 represents a huge leap forward in user experience and browser technology, and is the start of Mozilla's fight back to keep the web a free, open, and innovative space for its users. Subsequent releases are pegged for more performance and security improvements.
Firefox 59 will bring WebRender over, another big component from Servo. This component paints the composite part of the image to the page, including "reflows", when parts of the page are redrawn in response to for example user interaction, adding more snappiness to the user experience.
Once integrated, most of the browser window will be rendered using Rust, leaving Firefox's Javascript engine Spidermonkey as the only major component from the original browser still in the control of some of the page.
They also plan on integrating some of the sandboxing features from the Chromium project in future releases to further isolate processes and tabs from interfering with one another.
Are you excited about this release of Firefox? Do these new updates temp you to switch from Chrome? Let me know in the comments. And if you liked this post, please Resteem, Upvote, and follow me @hexydec.