{"id":19587,"date":"2017-11-17T14:23:47","date_gmt":"2017-11-17T19:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=19587"},"modified":"2017-11-21T14:13:26","modified_gmt":"2017-11-21T19:13:26","slug":"firefox-quantum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/17\/firefox-quantum\/","title":{"rendered":"Firefox Quantum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Mayo<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It’s fast. Really fast. Firefox Quantum is over twice as fast as Firefox from 6 months ago, built on a completely overhauled core engine with brand new technology stolen from our advanced research group, 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 the competition. Your computer will thank you. 🙂<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Via John Voorhees<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I haven’t had an opportunity to thoroughly test Firefox on my Mac, but even after opening 50 tabs on a fresh install of the browser, many of which were notoriously heavy sites, Firefox remained responsive.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I’m not sure it’s twice as fast, but it really does feel faster than previous versions of Firefox, and perhaps faster than Safari in some cases. I still prefer Safari, though, because it’s a better Mac app<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n

K.Q. Dreger<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

If you haven’t tried Firefox since Chrome came out, or you’ve always used your operating system’s default browser, I’d encourage you give the new Firefox a shot. It’s free and I was left genuinely surprised.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Rui Carmo<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Another thing that worried me was that Firefox seems to have a larger energy footprint and was still claiming a significant percentage of CPU cycles (5-10%) while out of focus and “idle”.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Manish Goregaokar<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Rust code began shipping in Firefox<\/a> last year, starting with relatively small\npilot projects like an MP4 metadata parser to replace some uses of libstagefright. These components\nperformed well and caused effectively no crashes, but browser development had yet to see large\nbenefits from the full power Rust could offer. This changes today.<\/p>\n

Firefox Quantum includes Stylo, a pure-Rust CSS engine that makes full use of Rust’s\n“Fearless Concurrency<\/a>” to speed up page styling. It’s the first major component of Servo to be\nintegrated with Firefox, and is a major milestone for Servo, Firefox, and Rust. It replaces\napproximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

This top-down structure is ripe for parallelism; however, since styling is a complex process, it’s\nhard to get right. Mozilla made two previous attempts to parallelize its style system in C++, and\nboth of them failed. But Rust’s fearless concurrency has made parallelism practical! We use rayon<\/a>\n—one of the hundreds of crates<\/a> Servo uses from Rust’s ecosystem — to drive a work-stealing cascade\nalgorithm. You can read more about that in Lin Clark’s post<\/a>. Parallelism leads to a lot\nof performance improvements, including a 30% page load speedup for Amazon’s homepage.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Todd Ditchendorf<\/a>:<\/p>\n

While they’ve been inventing Rust, Firefox has lost most of its market share, completely missed mobile, & the latest Servo .app release is completely non-functional on my Mac. Meanwhile Mozilla is celebrating their greenfield research success story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess it depends on what you find more important: a fantastic new programming language, or a relevant indie browser that’s not controlled by a BigCo or tracking your every move. But while there are lots of cool prog langs, there was only one relevant indie browser.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now we have yet another cool programming language, and no relevant indie browsers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Update (2017-11-21): Matt Birchler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Both Apple and Google’s web apps make me feel like I’m living through the ActiveX days all over again. Firefox sadly feels like a second class citizen because of this.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Mayo: It’s fast. Really fast. Firefox Quantum is over twice as fast as Firefox from 6 months ago, built on a completely overhauled core engine with brand new technology stolen from our advanced research group, and graced with a beautiful new look designed to get out of the way and let you do what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[800,338,279,30,32,1529,571,138,71,408,96],"class_list":["post-19587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-concurrency","tag-css","tag-firefox","tag-mac","tag-macapp","tag-macos-10-13","tag-memory-management","tag-optimization","tag-programming","tag-rust-lang","tag-web"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19587"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19617,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19587\/revisions\/19617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}