Mozilla plans to release a new web engine for its Firefox browser next year that should load websites superfast and should provide an improved user experience. The new engine is called Quantum and the browser developer claims it will be a giant leap forward on browser performance.
The performance increase is possible due to better utilisation of modern hardware, such as multi-core CPU and GPUs. The engine will also render the most important content with the highest priority. The new engine will first be based on Mozilla's current engine Gecko and over time, major engine components that will benefit most from parallelization, or from offloading to the GPU, will be replaced by Quantum components.
"We’re taking on a lot of separate but related initiatives as part of Quantum, and we’re revisiting many old assumptions and implementations. The high-level approach is to rethink many fundamental aspects of how a browser engine works," David Bryant, Head of Platform Engineering writes in a blog.
"We’ll be re-engineering foundational building blocks, like how we apply CSS styles, how we execute DOM operations, and how we render graphics to your screen," he adds.
Mozilla stress it's an ambitious project but that users won't have to wait long before they can benefit from it. The first large improvements are scheduled for next year. A first version of the new Quantum engine will be released for Android, Linux, Mac and Windows and later possibly also for iOS.
"We’re confident Quantum will deliver significantly improved performance," Bryant concludes.
