HotPicks......................
Version: 57 Web: www.mozilla.org
Alexander Tolstoy hasn’t got time to train for the 2018 South Korean Winter Olympics. He’s too busy finding dope FOSS such as Firefox, F LO ff ice, GNU Time, Screenshot gun, JGuetz li Image I O Plugin, Mini tube, Cfg2html,Sp iv ak,QJ our nalctl,u li us and Caveexpress.
Mozilla’s flagship product has been hitting the news headlines recently thanks to this new release, which we really couldn’t miss. Even though HotPicks deliberately avoids reviewing such open source celebrities as Firefox or LibreOffice in order to shed light on less well-known applications, this time it is a different game.
In recent years Mozilla introduced a well-thought-out approach to its release policy: everyone who needed a stable, modern, yet not-so-rapidlychanging browser was advised to use the FirefoxESR edition, while the rest could enjoy the regular Firefox version, which gradually evolved from one release to another.
This time Firefox says goodbye to rounded Australis-styled tabs (introduced in late 2013) and rolls out Quantum – a web backend that combines Gecko code with the new Stylo CSS engine. Stylo is written in Rust and parses CSS styles in parallel processes. This gives Quantum a giant performance boost, which you will immediately notice. The new Firefox is blazingly fast: it is roughly twice as fast as Firefox56 and noticeably snappier than all web browsers based on Google’s Chromium. In the test with 30 open tabs, the new Firefox57 used 30% less RAM than Google Chrome61.
Mozilla has also dropped support for XUL/XPCOM extensions, which means that many legacy Firefox extensions are now broken – at least before they get re-written using the new WebExtensions technology, which is now Mozilla’s only standard for browser add-ons. Naturally, there are some users that will suffer from temporarily missing features without their add-ons, but we still believe that the mindblowing speed of Firefox57 is worth the cost.
The look and feel of Firefox is significantly different too: you’ll notice it in the redesigned main menu, the start page, the developer tools, and also the new Library button, which hosts history, bookmarks, downloads and synced content. Don’t hesitate to update your
Firefox installation to the newest version: it brings many great changes and a much-improved user experience.
“The new Firefox is blazingly fast: twice as fast as Firefox 56”