Firefox 57 Quantum is here, great Mozilla!

On November 14, Mozilla launched Firefox 57 on Windows, Mac and Linux. This is probably the biggest update in Firefox's 13-year history.

Did you quit using Firefox long ago when you found it slower than rival Chrome? With major changes in Firefox Quantum, especially in terms of browser speed, Mozilla wants you to come back.

See also: Is this the time to give Firefox another chance?

Having heard a lot about Mozilla's promises about this new 'bomb', now is the time to try to see if the truth is as advertised.

There are three major changes in Firefox 57 that make it faster, more powerful, and better.

1. New features include new themes, logos and New Tab pages.
2. New engine friendly to use multiple cores and exploit GPU effectively
3. Framework new add-on designed for modern web.

New face more beautiful

Quantum brings a whole new look to Firefox called Photon, which is cleaner, brighter and more responsive. The right-angle tab, the toolbar icons are also redesigned and the redo menu is the most significant change: the address bar and the search bar combine and stay in the middle. If you don't like it, you can switch back to the old style, separate the address bar and search.

New changes in the address bar and search

In general, the Photon interface changes every detail on the UI, both the toolbar icon and the transitions and page loading effects. Some new features also include a Firefox library (menu for quick access to browsing history, bookmarks, saved on Pocket and synced tabs), Screenshots (screenshot).

New menu to access multiple tasks

New Tab page is also completely new, using more reasonable space, displaying recent searches and sharing articles on Pocket. Pocket buttons also remove from the toolbar and switch to the address-search bar.

Speed ​​faster

Mozille advertises that Firefox QUantum is twice as fast as Firefox 49, and uses less memory than Google Chrome 30%. According to Speedometer 2.0, Firefox 57 is twice as fast as Firefox 52. Partly because the new CSS engine is Stylo with architecture that handles many processes, prioritizing smarter tabs . 'We push ourselves to keep up, and sometimes even ahead of Chrome,' said Mark Mayo, vice president of Firefox said. 'We doubled the speed of Firefox this year and the goal is to duplicate it again in 2018'.

Framework for better utilities

For many people, the biggest change of Firefox 57 is not the interface or the things that are not visible in the engine, but the fact that they don't use many old add-ons anymore. Developers have been warned and have time to prepare for this.

See also: What extensions are no longer working on FireFox 'fire fox'?

Many add-ons are ready to use WebExtensions. Here is a list of usable extensions in Firefox 57. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?tag=firefox57

Firefox Quantum is just the beginning

Firefox 57 is an important milestone not only for the Firefox project, but also for Mozilla and other open source software in general. No advertising about Quantum is too much, it's really faster, stronger, better than before.

Whether this will bring you back to Firefox, the competition between large browsers will become more attractive. Google will obviously be unhappy and will also make improvements to its browser.

Firefox is not just a browser, it also represents the open source community

Firefox plays an important role to get a 'free technology zone', not controlled by big guys like Apple or Google. Their mission is to keep the web open and competitive.

Download Firefox 57

If you use Windows, Mac, Linux, you can download Firefox 57 directly from the homepage.https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ If using Ubuntu, Firefox 57 will be updated automatically with supported kernels (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 16.05 LTS and the latest Ubuntu version 17.10). Versions for iOS and Android will also be released soon.