Mozilla has a plan for how to beat Chrome. Meet the Firefox 57 and battle fox in armor

At the June conference of developers of Mozilla All Hands 2017, there was no familiar chanterelle on stage (in fact, firefox is a minor panda, it's just accepted to call it that) - the unchangeable talisman of Firefox in the past 14 years. At the opening of the conference, Mozilla’s Firefox senior vice president of Firefox development, Mark Mayo, explained what had happened. The matter is serious. It's time for war. The little chanterelle is now clad in an armored suit following the example of Iron Man - and is ready to give change to the abuser.

Mozilla has been working on a completely new browser version for a year, which will be released on November 14, 2017 under Firefox 57. It’s not a coincidence that the chanterelle in the suit is called Mark 57. This version of the Mozilla browser has the highest hopes, writes Cnet. The company Mozilla believes that the version of Firefox 57 will be exactly the version that will force many former users to return back to Firefox.

For many years, the market share of Firefox even on desktops has been steadily declining , and the share of Chrome is growing. To date, according to StatCounter statistics , Chrome on desktop computers has a share of 63.47%, and Firefox has only 13.83%. Many Firefox hardcore fans have now become happy Chrome users.

This situation in no way suits Mozilla, and Firefox does not think to give up.
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The graph of changes in the share of browsers on desktops is very eloquent. The release of Chrome in 2009 literally knocked down Firefox: since 2010, the decline has begun, which continues to this day.



On mobile devices, Chrome has a smaller market share, but Firefox does not exist here at all (in StatCounter statistics). As Mozilla’s former technical director Andreas Gal (Andreas Gal) wrote , it’s pretty obvious from this graph that Firefox goes nowhere: “This means that the revered Fox will stay with us for many, many years, despite the constantly decreasing market share. This also means, unfortunately, that turning is almost impossible. ”

Andreas believes that an unenviable fate awaits Firefox, because with the change of CEO about three years ago, a strategic decision was made that Mozilla will again concentrate on Firefox and the desktop market, and the web has now moved to mobile devices.

Andreas Gal believes that even the technical superiority of Firefox over Chrome in the desktop version of the browser will not have an effect on market trends: “Browsers are a product of mass consumption. They look almost the same and work almost the same. All browsers work quite well, and if one of them will work a little faster or consume a little less memory, then this is unlikely to affect users. "

Andreas himself has already quit Mozilla, but the remaining 1,200 employees cannot reason in the same vein. In addition to fighting for your browser, Mozilla is still fighting for an open free web, trying to prevent the monopoly of a single browser.

Therefore, Firefox will fight to the last. And this battle is headed by the same new CEO Chris Bird (Chris Beard), who took over the company in April 2014 and staked on the desktop browser. Firefox 57 testing began on Wednesday, August 2, 2017. This will be a very important release. Chris Bird compares him to the Big Bang: “We are going to bring back a lot of people,” he promises. Firefox is back!



In Firefox 57, the company decided to submit a paid membership with a subscription to a number of proprietary services. It will be a kind of “Mozilla community”, which in the future may even become an influential political force, as well as help the finances of a non-profit organization. Mozilla sees its political role in the fight against monopolies and advertising empires - this is Google search, Facebook feed, etc.

But for the plans to be realized, Firefox 57 must be good from a technical point of view. Reportedly, the most important changes are related to the Quantum project . Multiprocessing has already been introduced, which significantly improves browser performance. Other components of the project are Stylo (speeding up formatting operations), Quantum Flow (eliminating bugs that slow down the browser), Quantum Compositor (speeding up site rendering), WebRender (hardware rendering acceleration).

Quantum has become the new engine and Firefox 57 . The main focus is on performance optimization. Actually, these optimizations Mozilla systematically leads recently. According to the Speedometer test, over the past year, Firefox performance under Windows has increased by 45%, and under MacOS - by 38%.

But even if Firefox is unmatched in speed, will it help to return the audience? The developers promise a modern interface Photon , smooth animations and clear interface elements at any resolution. A number of other changes were made: the window title became black, a separate search line disappeared by default, an automatic transition to touchscreen mode was implemented by clicking on the screen, the menu bar for page actions was made in the address bar (bookmark, save, etc.). The developers even dared to make rectangular tabs instead of rounded ( RIP ) tabs . Redesigned navigation icons and more.



Let's hope that the authors of the popular extensions will have time to rewrite them before the final release of Firefox 57, because they will have to do this: Firefox has switched to the Web Extensions standard.