Going back twenty years, websites were mainly text documents with images and hyperlinks to other websites. However, today, they are interactive experiences with instant messaging pop-ups, autoplaying video, auto-updating articles and animated graphics that swoop around the page as one scroll.
Because of the changes that has happened, Mozilla decided it's time for them to update its Firefox browser to catch up with this complex reality. The nonprofit organization on Thursday made known their project called "Quantum" that aims to dramatically accelerate its browser starting by the end of 2017.
Quantum will take full advantage of modern PC and mobile hardware, exploiting parallelism to run processes across multiple cores and the GPU. It will also be at the core of the browser, responsible for its overall performance, PC World reports.
"We are striving for performance gains from Quantum that will be so noticeable that your entire web experience will feel different," David Bryant, Mozilla's head of platform engineering, said. "Pages will load faster, and scrolling will be silky smooth. Animations and interactive apps will respond instantly, and be able to handle more intensive content while holding consistent frame rates. And the content most important to you will automatically get the highest priority, focusing processing power where you need it the most."
According to CNET, the organization has struggled competing with the likes of Google's Chrome, which is more popular.
Moreover, the software that they are developing will run on personal computers using Windows, MacOS and Linux and on mobile devices powered by Android. Currently, Apple only allows its own browser engine, WebKit, on iPhones and iPads, but Bryant added, "someday we hope to offer this new engine for iOS too."
As to what makes Quantum special, "Quantum is all about making extensive use of parallelism and fully exploiting modern hardware. Quantum has a number of componenets, inclusing several adaopted from the Servo project," Bryant added.
The video below is a presentation by Jack Moffitt who talks about Servo in particular and how it will benefit Firefox in the near future:
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