Mozilla will significantly improve the performance of Firefox with the new Quantum engine.

Browsers have come a long way from displaying static web pages to complex interactive web applications. Having reached the limit of the capabilities of existing technologies, browser developers had to come up with something new - modern web applications are increasingly demanding in terms of hardware. And good performance should even be on devices that fit in a pants pocket.

Mozilla has announced a project - Quantum . This is a new engine for Firefox. According to the developers, the full use of Rust and Servo high-speed components will provide more GPU-parallelization features.
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Quantum is a logical continuation of the development of projects such as Servo and Rust.

The new Servo engine is better suited for multi-core mobile device processors, and by breaking tasks into parallel threads, it can significantly reduce the load time of web pages. The engine is written from scratch completely in the Rust language, which Mozilla developed itself for writing mobile applications. From the very beginning, South Korean Samsung Electronics has participated in the development of Servo.

Thus, there is a simple relationship: Rust → Servo → Quantum.

In addition to the above innovations, Mozilla worked on another project - Electrolysis . The creators call it “the biggest innovation we’ve ever added to the browser,” writes Mozilla developer Asa Dotzler.

Electrolysis separated the processing of web content from the processing of the browser's graphical user interface, separating them across different processes. This means that if any of the open pages suddenly started loading the processor , the user will not lose control over the other tabs, buttons, and browser menus.

In terms of parallelization, Mozilla lags behind Opera, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. In them, the browser splits the elements into several processes, allowing you to use more than one core. But the company promises to release version 51 with Electrolysis in January 2017. And in November, users receive an intermediate version - 50.

Thus, Mozilla will get rid of most of the components of the old Gecko engine. It is not distinguished by the ability to effectively parallelize operations and is almost incapable of sufficiently utilizing the resources of multi-core processors, since it was created before the advent of such chips.

“We will reengineer the main components responsible for supporting CSS styles, performing DOM operations and rendering graphics,” said David Bryant, head of development for the Firefox platform.

Mozilla plans to release a full-fledged release of Firefox with Quantum on board by the end of 2017. It will be available to users of Android, Windows, Mac and Linux. IOS support will not be included in this release, but it may be added in the future.

In April 2016, Firefox was ranked in popularity by Edge and Internet Explorer browsers created by Microsoft. However, it lags significantly behind Chrome. In April, the share of Firefox in the market of desktop browsers was 15.6%, while the share of Chrome was 60.5%.