Mozilla Firefox

Because we only like to reinvent the wheel when we have toBeta releaseFor many, today is just another day. Well, not for me, my team, and all the other people who spent the last six months on version 57 of the browser, the new Firefox Quantum. Today ... [More] , we’re going into Beta release with the new UI which adheres to the new Photon visual language. If you feel your head spinning, you’re right. Let’s put one thing after another.Style guide vs. design systemsMy name is Emanuela Damiani, and in few days, it will be one year since I began working at Mozilla.When I joined, I was asked to focus my attention on two products in particular: add-ons and the new design system.Building a design system is not an easy job. First, what is a Design System? What is it not? What are the differences between a style guide and a pattern library? All those questions were buzzing in my mind like one hundred bees.A design system is not a one-man job. When you I say ‘we’, I mean: Tina, Tori, Helen, Amin, Markus, Philip and myself.Our team is not too big, or too small. It has six members, distributed from Vancouver to Taipei, passing through central Europe, and with just one person able to work 100% on the design system. Since the beginning, we have tried to use Slack as much as is possible to make it easy for anyone to give feedback and fill the gap of not being able to share time together.When we all met together at the beginning of November last year, there was a zombie Firefox style guide in the wild.We wanted to learn from that failure. We spent time interviewing anyone who worked on that project. What was the challenge? Why did the few things in the style guide feel so different from everything present in the product?A design system success is not connected with the launch of style-guide or a UI-kit. The real success happens when your design system is adopted in your products.One main point of failure of the previous style guide was in the process taken by the team. Without a complete inventory, the team was documenting and improving at the same time, ending up with some excellent and delightful insights for future development but nothing truly actionable for the present or representative of the product.Plus, the style-guide had a strong focus only on the desktop, ignoring the complex ecosystem where Firefox products live.Photon: from a visual refresh to a visual language“We started from the existing style guide, we checked if the identified macro areas were still valid, and we analyzed (or looked at) other existing design systems that were around for a while.”— Amin Meanwhile, somewhere else in the organization, a group of people decided it was time to give all the cool improvements on the backend (a.k.a. Quantum) a nice visual refresh. The code name for this project was Photon.That was the perfect opportunity for us. We started from there. All of the visual changes are expected to be in the product, overruling previous decisions. We had to start somewhere, so we started there.Our first job was to understand all of the design decisions and be ready to raise our hands if some choices contradicted each other or did not meet accessibility standards. We made them aware of the other projects, products, constraints, and needs of other teams so that the team in charge of the visual refresh would have a more broad understanding of the design and development requirements.While we were documenting, we ended up actively co-designing what eventually became a real design language that supported multiple platforms and multiple products.Design for Scale“The higher the expected visibility on parts of your work, the more important it is to align to Photon. If very limited visibility is expected, full alignment is of lower priority. Use platform components until you have time to align better.”— Design for Scale, Photon Design SystemWe wanted to have documentation that combines theory and resources where theories are principles, visual guidelines, and patterns, and resources are everything from visual assets to tokens, from demos to templates, and from tools to code.But how might we build a successful design language that also able to feel native in all the different platforms? Designing for scale is a challenging, delicate task. We wanted to support people going through this task and provide written content to help them understand this principle and apply it.Feedback, feedback, feedback“With every page, we added we learned, step by step — we learned how to structure pages, how to structure the whole system, and we learned how to align differences between individual design teams and how to get people to make decisions that can be structured and documented.”— Markus While we’re building the design system, we never stop collecting feedback by everyone on the Firefox team. In the end, those people are our primary users.We like to think of the design system as a tool, a tool which enables other people, designers and non-designers, to design. It saves time on digging into Sketch files, trying to find patterns from other designers, and fixing design issues like incoherency, accessibility across platforms, and localization.During Mozilla’s June 2017 All Hands in San Francisco, we spent hours just talking with different product teams, asking for feedback. How are they using the system? How is the system relevant for them?When you ask “Can you bring somebody from your team?” and 15 people show up, you know you’re doing something right.Photon Design System: todayFirst, we gave it a name: Photon — it just makes sense, right?Three months ago, we had a lot of visual decisions documented on the website, and many of those decisions were already on the Nightly release, but the design of our site didn’t really seem to reflect any of it. So, we applied all the principles documented in the product. The Photon Design System website today reveals how we use it in the wild.We are working on the components and patterns. Day to day, our job resembles a detective’s. We follow leads in all the products and identify the ones that can bring extra value to the Firefox team. Where we see complexity, we act to simplify.We want everyone who builds for Firefox to use the design system in their everyday workflow. Using the design system should be not more than easy, it should feel natural. To accomplish that, we’re focusing not only on the content but also on building tools and resources.Final thoughtsFor many, today is just another day. For the Photon Design System team, it’s when we see the system’s value realized.Photon Design SystemA design system is not built overnight but shaped gradually through our daily practices. It evolves every day — or maybe every week — and most importantly, it’s never done.Just another day was originally published in Firefox User Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story. [Less]

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Highlights Firefox Quantum (57) is now on Beta! Developer Edition has also gone to 57! Tell everyone you know, tell people you don’t know, test like crazy, file bugs! How much faster? Twice. Twice more faster. Firefox for iOS 9.0 shipped ... [More] last week! 🎉 Crash ratio and stability for 9.0 is good and without surprises. The work we have done in terms of stability appears to have paid off! About 40% of our users have upgraded to Firefox for iOS 9.0 About 30% of our users have upgraded to iOS 11 Just in case you need a little extra space! Containers officially launched as an add-on on AMO! Related to that, we removed the (old) containers toolbar icon. See jkt’s email to dev-platform for more info. Activity Stream has replaced about:home! It’s passing all relevant performance tests and browser startup benchmarks, but we’ve still got a few ideas up our sleeves to improve speed a bit more. We’re targeting on shipping Activity Stream as the default home and newtab page for Firefox 57! There’s now an option to toggle extra vertical drag space on browser windows without a titlebar or menubar. We added new copy and illustrations to (almost) all the error pages (thank you to Prathiksha & Erica for helping out). You can do it, little buddy! Swanky new panel animations landed! Swoosh! Friends of the Firefox team (Give a shoutout/thanks to people for helping fix and test bugs. Introductions) Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2fLz71p More than one bug fixed: :prathiksha Adam Hillier Maya Messinger Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie Tooru Fujisawa [:arai] New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!) 🌟 anting004 updated the icons used in the customize mode theme panel for the default, dark and light themes! 🌟 F Seita [:fseita] made the names for some of the variables and primitives used in the Telemetry back-end much clearer! 🌟 Maya Messinger updated the ordering of items in the Library panel to match the Photon spec! Project Updates Add-ons Added a prompt for the devtools_page manifest permission Switched browserSettings to be an optional permission The address bar is now cleared when opening a new tab page that is being overridden by an extension! The enter key is now prevented from closing extension panels The toolbar text color can now be modified separately from the global text color, via themes A new default search engine can be added via the is_default option A basic implementation of storage.managed is now available. Here’s the API documentation on MDN – expect this to be fleshed out more soon. browsingData is now able to clear IndexedDB data about:preferences now shows when an extension is controlling the new tab page. Now if an add-on overrides your new tab or home pages, you know which one did it. Added support for the devtools.panels.elements sidebar.setExpression API method. Lots of performance fixes, bug fixes and code cleanup! Activity Stream Landed improved Top Sites with full rich icon support! Browser Architecture Formed a team to do a design review on XBL removal plans Sent out a front-end developer survey See our most recent newsletter! Electrolysis (e10s) Improvements to memory usage means we might consider increasing the content process limit at some point in the future. Check out erahm’s blog post! Firefox Core Engineering Update agent work has begun, starting with the downloader, which plans to spin off the update download as a background process (so the update continues even if the user’s session ends). This is aiming for Firefox 58. Optimized data in crash reports and crash ping processing have landed in Firefox 57 (even though they were targeted for 58). JAWS client version has been added to the updater URL, just in time for Firefox 56. Form Autofill We will do a gradual rollout of Address Autofill for 56 (en-US in the US) with a Shield Experiment that flips the right preferences. Credit card autofill quality is being improved and will ship when it’s ready (sometime after Firefox 57). We fixed the following bugs: [Form Autofill] Manage credit cards dialog should have the ability to mask card numbers again after they are shown [Form Autofill] Add “Learn more” links to SUMO pages in preferences [Form Autofill] Fix manage addresses / credit cards line height problem [Form Autofill] -“Form Autofill Preferences” is displayed under the profile suggestions on MacOS [Form Autofill] – “Never Save Credit Cards” text is displayed with small c for credit in the door hanger [Form Autofill] Collect information on how much time users spent on page with credit card forms Always build the form autofill system add-on but disable it by default on release Form Autofill preferences should support search function [Form Autofill] Add a pref to hide credit card autofill feature browser_creditCard_doorhanger.js is going to permafail when Gecko 57 merges to Beta [Form Autofill] FormAutofillHandler.jsm, line 182: TypeError: fieldDetail is undefined [Form Autofill] Disable credit card heuristics when credit card availability is set to false [Form Autofill] Add test cases to check the search result that fallback from credit card fields Mobile First Firefox iOS 9.1 Beta is in QA and will ship soon with a modest list of small fixes First Firefox iOS 10.0 Beta is currently being prepared. This is our Photon UI release. We expect to have it on TestFlight for our Beta testers very soon. The Firefox iOS team’s focus for the upcoming release is on Photon, Telemetry and Stability Photon Performance mconley is working on getting tab warming working again – just getting through some test failures Florian is working on automated frame counting and flickering detection in screen recording videos. Structure Created a “Recent Highlights” list in the library, with data from Activity Stream Saw something interesting? It might be in Recent Highlights! Seems there are some cases where this stops showing up (either in other windows / after “a while”) – if you can help with solid STR, that would be awesome. Fixed a bunch of polish bugs. Visuals Volunteer :Towkir replaced the bookmark toolbar icons with new shiny Photon icons. Consistency is good! Dale prevented a strange bug where the tab bar would scroll when you leave customize mode. Johann finally made the Windows 7 tabs toolbar adhere to the Photon spec, clearing up a couple of bugs that had accumulated there during the last weeks. Nihanth switched the titlebar on macOS to always use the native appearance. And lots! of small regression fixes and polish work. Privacy/Security Prathiksha finished up a few polish bugs on permission management, we consider it MVP-ready and it’s shipping in Firefox 57! Who’s in control? You are. Search and Navigation Address Bar: The network code fix to prevent speculative connections from showing certificate dialogs landed again in Nightly 58 and got uplifted. Speculative connections from the Address Bar will be enabled in Firefox Quantum The Address bar now can merge results from the previous search into the current one, to reduce flickering of matching results. The patch also removed about 2000 “potential” reflows! Fixed wrong cropping of matching results in the Address Bar, regressed by the recent changes to the merging method Added preferences to more easily show/hide the Search Bar in Photon Unified URL / Search bar, or separated? We’ll leave that up to you. Places: The recent Activity Stream work on favicons caused a couple regressions. We fixed favicons using “masked” icons even if we still don’t support them and  tabs favicons using “rich” icons instead of common favicons (Firefox Quantum) The hashes used by Places to match on URIs are now faster to calculate. This change is partially non backwards compatible, so profiles downgraded from Firefox 58 to 57 may hit unexpected bugs when trying to modify/remove bookmarks/history for certain URIs (very long ones or containing high unicode chars) Since Quantum/Photon got priority, Places Async Transactions have been delayed to Firefox 58, to properly solve the remaining performance issues. But the work continues on functional regressions and async APIs conversion. Other: We are going to launch a Cliqz funnelcake in Germany in the next days. Sqlite on Linux is now a tiny bit more I/O efficient thanks to a contributed patch by Wei Liang using fdatasync when it’s available. Sync / Firefox Accounts Edouard is implementing native “toast” desktop notifications for Windows 8 and 10! Kit is porting structured bookmark application to Desktop from iOS. Instead of applying downloaded bookmarks directly to Places, we’ll stage them in a separate buffer, run a tree merge, resolve conflicts, and then update Places in a single transaction. This will fix a class of persistent bugs around random dupes, moves, reordering, incorrectly merged folders, interrupted syncs, and devices falling out of sync with the server. Thom is removing more event loop spinning from Sync. This should prevent Sync from spuriously appearing in performance profiles, unless it’s actually janking the browser. Edouard landed a more responsive Sync animation if you click “Sync Now” at startup before Sync has loaded. Web Payments Here are the in-tree docs for Web Payments if you’re interested in contributing! We landed the following bugs: Bug 1402210 – Add PaymentRequest UI documentation and do minor code cleanup Bug 1382388 – Make the PaymentRequest dialog unprivileged and remote plus add an abort button Dialog contents are now in a remote, unprivileged frame to improve security and responsiveness. See docs for more info. Currently working on Bug 1383300 – Show origin and total roughly similar to the UX specs. A platform bug hindering manual testing was fixed by another landing. Here are the raw meeting notes that were used to derive this list. Want to help us build Firefox? Get started here! Here’s a tool to find some mentored, good first bugs to hack on. [Less]

Sorry, everyone. I am well aware that SourceForge is down and you can't download TenFourFox FPR3 (or, for that matter, Classilla) right now. I don't have any control over that. If this keeps up more than a day or two, we'll see if we can get ... [More] alternative hosting up somewhere. Also, my office PC (Windows 7) is now on the Firefox 57 beta and it's ... really garish and ugly looking. Switching the layout to Compact and the theme to Light helps a little with the tab bar, but the KITT loading tab animation is distracting, the icons manage to be intrusive and bland simultaneously, and the new logo is a bad LSD trip (to say nothing of the fact half my extensions stopped working, and while I knew that was coming, most of them have no replacement because the APIs don't yet exist). While I thought Australis was a step backwards in terms of utility, at least it had some design consistency. Photon, on the other hand, is all over the place and it's an unwelcome change on top of everything else. I'm almost afraid to update Firefox on the MacBook Air. But, to be fair, it is palpably faster. Much faster. I certainly can't argue that. Nevertheless, the compromises made are such that if it weren't for Google's relentless commitment to snoop on everything I do, I have to candidly say I'm not sure I'd be sticking with the new Firefox. [Less]

Join us for a special, series finale “ask me anything” (AMA) episode of the Mozilla Curriculum Workshop at noon ET, on Tuesday, September 26th, 2017....

Firefox Quantum is now available in Developer Edition, and this Firefox is fast. As a reader of the Hacks blog, you may be familiar with Project Quantum, our attempt to refactor, redesign, replace, and modernize the very core of Firefox. We’ve ... [More] shipped many incremental improvements to Firefox in the past, but this release marks the first milestone where we believe Firefox fundamentally feels like a newer, better browser. To celebrate, we gave Developer Edition a brand new logo: Why does this feel like a brand new browser? Read on! Firefox Quantum: Towards a next-gen browser Developer Edition now includes “Quantum CSS,” an entirely new CSS engine written in Rust and based on the Servo parallel browser engine project. Additionally, the “Quantum Flow” team tracked down and fixed 369 performance bugs in Firefox, with a special focus on responsiveness and UI interactions. Lastly, the “Quantum DOM” project began overhauling how Firefox prioritizes work, responding more quickly to events like user input while delaying less urgent computations until the browser is idle. The result? Compared to Firefox six months ago, today’s Developer Edition is twice as fast on benchmarks like Speedometer 2.0 that simulate the real-world performance of modern web applications. Furthermore, Firefox is 64-bit and multi-process by default, and Firefox’s unique architecture allows it to take advantage of modern, multi-core processors while still respecting your available RAM. Meanwhile, the “Quantum Compositor” project significantly reduced crashes caused by buggy graphics drivers. Photon: Firefox’s new UI To complement Quantum, the Photon team rebuilt Firefox’s interface to be faster and more modern: You’ll hear more about Photon in November, but highlights include redesigned menus, square tabs, and a new “Library” button that acts as a single place for your bookmarks, downloads, history, etc. By default, Photon combines the search and URL bars into a single widget, but the old style is only a preference away. The “Activity Stream” project redesigned the New Tab Page to feature highlights from your recent history and bookmarks, as well as recommendations from Pocket. Of course, each of these content blocks are optional, and add-ons can completely replace the new tab page to create entirely different experiences. We also refreshed form handling in Firefox, adding a brand new autofill feature and implementing built-in widgets for and elements. Lastly, Firefox’s preferences were completely redesigned and are now searchable. DevTools in 57: Redesigned and better than ever Firefox Quantum: Developer Edition also includes a ton of refined, redesigned, and brand new developer tools. A few highlights: The Console, Debugger, and Network tabs are now implemented using standard web technologies, including React and Redux, as part of our “devtools.html” effort. The Inspector gained tons of new features for working with CSS Grid, CSS Variables, toggling classes on elements, etc. The Console now supports grouping messages and expanding / inspecting objects in-line. The Debugger offers completely new ways to search, navigate, and debug projects. And that’s not all. To read in greater depth about what’s new in Firefox Developer Tools, check out Developer Edition Devtools Update.   Project Quantum: There’s more to come Today’s release is a major milestone in Project Quantum, but we’re not done. Future releases of Firefox will include Quantum Render, a brand new, GPU-optimized rendering pipeline based on Servo’s WebRender project, and Quantum DOM Scheduler, a new technique that ensures that tabs in the background can’t slow down your active tabs. Try out Developer Edition today, or sign up to get notified when Firefox Quantum is released to mainline Firefox. Either way, stay tuned to the Hacks blog to learn more about Project Quantum! [Less]

Firefox 57 Developer Edition was just released! It’s such an advance that we’ve given this browser a new name: Firefox Quantum. This is a great opportunity to tell you about what the DevTools team has been up to since our last major update back in ... [More] March. DevTools visual update Say hello to a complete visual refresh of both our Light and Dark themes, matching the new visual style of Firefox Quantum. (We call this UI Photon.) The new design is simpler, cleaner and has better contrast. We also updated all the syntax highlighting colors to improve text readability. Check out this in-depth blog post at Firefox Nightly News by our UX Designer Victoria Wang for more details and research that went into choosing just the right colors. Inspector CSS Grid is taking over the web, and DevTools are here to help you master grids. Head over to the new Layout panel in the Inspector, where the CSS Grid widget lists all of the grid containers on the page. The grid overlays have also been improved: they now show line numbers, area names and adapt to the most complex CSS transforms. Ever been bugged by a DOM element showing up in an unexpected spot? The Layout panel shows detailed box-model information, with all properties relevant to positioning, including the offset parent. There are too many goodies in the Layout panel to list here, so have a look at this recent post covering the layout panel in the new Inspector. CSS Variables are now widely supported and ready to be used in the wild! The Inspector shows the current value of a variable on hover. It also explains why a variable has a given value for the selected element. It’s super-useful to be able to add, remove, and togge classnames when debugging CSS. Now you can easily do this from the Inspector. Click on the “.cls” button to reveal all of the classes applied to the selected element. You can toggle any of them or add new ones. Don’t remember all the possible values possible for font-variant? That’s ok, you shouldn’t have to! Our CSS auto-completion now returns many more values. I want to highlight one last feature of the Inspector. If you work with test automation tools, you will like the new Copy XPath context-menu option. This feature used to be in Firebug, and we are really glad to bring it back to DevTools! Console We are shipping a new Console UI in Firefox Quantum (Firefox 57)! Joining the Debugger and the Network Monitor, the Console has been rewritten using modern web technologies such as React and Redux. Looking forward to your feedback! The new Console allows you to inspect objects in context. When an object is logged in the console, you can simply expand it and explore its contents. Existing features of the previous UI, such as filters and network request details, have also been ported to this new front-end. Console.group() and groupCollapsed() are super useful to make your logs more organized and readable. Modern frameworks’ loggers nicely group & format bursts of updates. You can now collapse log groups to see only what matters to you. Did you know you could persist logs when navigating from page to page? The “Persist Logs” checkbox is now much easier to find, directly in the Console panel. Debugger Thanks to all the feedback received since the new Debugger was first released on Developer Edition, we are shipping it to all channels with Firefox 56. Thanks again for your help, let’s take a look at the main new features. Outline View & Function Search Debugging is often about finding the right method. The new debugger features an outline view, with links to all the methods defined in the current source. If you prefer searching, you can also use function search and quickly jump to any function. Project Search Speaking of search, the new Debugger introduces project search, a.k.a. “Find in all files”. Pretty useful if you need to find where this alert (“foo”) is coming from. This was one of our top requested features, we are very happy to ship it in Firefox 57. Collapsed Framework Callstacks Frameworks and libraries are everywhere in the Web landscape, and Firefox Developer Tools embrace this! The debugger now displays matching icons in callstacks for framework sources. Framework methods are also collapsed by default in callstacks, so no need to scroll through foreign method calls anymore. You can also enable blackboxing to completely forget about a file and never have to step through it. Pinned (AST) Breakpoints With pinned breakpoints, the Debugger will keep track of your breakpoints even when the code changes. You can move methods in your source files, and breakpoints will automatically stay on the correct statements. Async Stepping Async & await will change the way we write asynchronous code for the better. The Debugger can now seamlessly step-over or step-in with async functions. If you want to follow more closely the (very active!) development of the Debugger, you should check out the weekly updates published by the team. Source maps Babel, SCSS, WebAssembly, TypeScript… Compiling JS and CSS is now common practice. As a result, the code that the browser uses looks pretty different from the original source files. We finally support sourcemaps in all our major tools, so you can focus on working with your original files. Network Monitor Scheme, timings, headers… Here are just some of the new Netmonitor columns! You can choose your own set of columns to see only what you want. The filter input also provides auto-completion based on the column names, to build powerful filter queries. What does the ETag header mean? What is status code 502? The Netmonitor now links to MDN Web Docs to help you learn about request & response headers, status codes, timings etc… Timings for DOMContentLoaded and load are crucial when analyzing the performance of a website. They are now clearly visible in the new status bar, next to the requests’ summary. You can now toggle “Persist Logs” and “Disable cache” right from the Network Monitor UI. This is super handy when you need to inspect a POST request that triggers a page navigation! Storage Inspector Tired of typing localStorage.setItem in the Console? You can now add new cookies or localStorage entries directly in the Storage Inspector. Last but not least, the Storage Inspector is now enabled by default for all channels! Thanks everyone! That was a long read, thanks for reading to the end. We hope you will enjoy the new features we are rolling out. Feedback welcome, find us on Slack or on #devtools at irc.mozilla.org. And a HUGE thank you to all the contributors: You are doing an amazing job on DevTools: Abhinav Koppula Adrien Enault Adrien Pachkoff Ahmed Towkir anejaalisha Bomsy (Hubert B Manilla) Brennan Brisad Christopher Phonis-Phine Eric Skoglund Espen Henriksen Gabrielle Singhcadieux Hemant Singh Henri Kemppainen Hossain Al Ikram Jaideep Bhoosreddy Leonardo Couto Locke Chen Maxwell Mayank Micah Tigley Michael Kohler Mike Park Mohammed Yaseen Khan nbeltran14 Tim Nguyen Nick Fox Nicolas Ouellet-Payeur Oriol Brufau Pinkney Ragnis Rahul Chaudhary Ruben Schmidmeister Ruturaj Vartak Santiago Paez Sebastian Zartner Sheldon Roddick Stanford Lockhart Stefan Yohansson Stoyan Dimitrov Stylizit (Matt R) Swapnesh Kumar Sahoo Vangelis Katsikaros Vera Vincent Lequertier Xavier ALT [Less]

The first embedded conference in Paris

Engines are important, both in cars and in browsers. That’s why we’re so revved up this morning – we’re releasing the Beta of a whole new Firefox, one that’s powered by a completely reinvented, modernized engine. Since the version number – 57 – can’t ... [More] really convey the magnitude of the changes we’ve made, and how much faster this new Firefox is, we’re calling this upcoming release Firefox Quantum. The journey to Firefox Quantum Last October we announced Project Quantum, our effort to create a next-generation engine for modern computers, by leveraging technology from our Servo research project. Since then, our engineering team has been relentless in their focus on making Firefox incredibly fast. Already this year we’ve launched several major improvements to Firefox that have it made it better than ever. For example, we’ve transformed Firefox to run using multiple processes, striking the “just right” balance between speed and memory usage. In addition, we’ve launched game-changing features like WebAssembly and WebVR, enabling super fast, near-native performance for web apps on the desktop and on VR headsets. We’ve shipped a lot already, but we’ve been planning for many more projects to come together in Firefox Quantum. Noticeably faster on many of the top websites Firefox Quantum is such a big leap forward that you’ll feel it instantly, just browsing your favorite websites. Turns out you can measure Firefox Quantum’s speed, too – our pit crew is kind of obsessed with a data-driven approach. One simple way of estimating browser performance is with Speedometer 2.0, a (still-in-development) benchmark that simulates modern web applications. Results vary based on the computer and apps you’re actively using, but one thing that’s relatively consistent is that Firefox Quantum is about 2X faster than Firefox was a year ago. We encourage you to make your own comparisons, but here’s a short video that captures our observations when comparing Firefox Quantum and Chrome on various websites. Firefox Quantum is often perceivably faster. Webpagetest running on Acer Aspire E15. Performance varies based on several factors.   So how we did we make Firefox Quantum so fast? Firefox has historically run mostly on just one CPU core, but Firefox Quantum takes advantage of multiple CPU cores in today’s desktop and mobile devices much more effectively. This improved utilization of your computer’s hardware makes Firefox Quantum dramatically faster. One example: we’ve developed a breakthrough approach to laying out pages: a super fast CSS engine written in Rust, a systems programming language that Mozilla pioneered. Firefox’s new CSS engine runs quickly, in parallel across multiple CPU cores, instead of running in one slower sequence on a single core. No other browser can do this. We’ve also improved Firefox so that the tab you’re actively using downloads and runs before other tabs you have open in the background. This prioritization of your active tab, along with Firefox’s “just right” multi-process architecture, results in Firefox Quantum often being faster than Chrome, while consuming roughly 30% less RAM. In addition, for the past several months we’ve run a browser-wide initiative to zap any instances of slowness you might encounter while using Firefox. So far our pit crew has fixed 468 of these issues, both small papercuts and big bottlenecks.   Introducing the fast and fluid Photon design It’s not enough to perform well on benchmarks, it’s also important that our users feel like they’re using a well thought out and high performance product.  To reflect all these under-the-hood improvements, we’ve refined and rebuilt Firefox’s user interface through our Photon project. Our talented team of designers and user researchers spent time understanding how users perceive web browsers, and in particular where they felt they were waiting on their browsers. With the new design, Firefox leaps ahead with a new interface that reflects today’s reality of High DPI displays and users who are more task focused than they’ve ever been. We’re confident that with Photon, Firefox Quantum users will be impressed by the modern new design that puts their needs first. Photon doesn’t just look good, it’s also smarter. If you’re using Photon on a Windows PC with a touch display, the menus change size based on whether you click with a mouse or touch with a finger. The new, minimalist design introduces square tabs, smooth animations, and a Library, which provides quick access to your saved stuff: bookmarks, Pocket, history, downloads, tabs, and screenshots. Firefox Quantum feels right at home with today’s mouse and touch-driven operating systems: Windows 10, macOS High Sierra, Android Oreo, and iOS 11.   https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Firefox-Quantum-Photon-UI-2.webm     Pocket built-in Firefox Quantum enhances Firefox’s integration with Pocket, the read-it-later app that Mozilla acquired last year. When you open a new tab, you’ll see currently trending web pages recommended by Pocket users so you won’t miss out on what’s hot online, as well as your top sites. With the Pocket app for iOS and Android, you’ll have offline access to your saved stories wherever you go.   https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Firefox-Quantum-integrates-Pocket.webm   Upgrade to Firefox Quantum soon, or download the Beta today If you’re already among the Firefox faithful, you’ll automatically upgrade to Firefox Quantum on November 14. But, if you enjoy the cutting edge, you can try it in Beta on desktop, Android, and iOS. Or, if you’re a web developer, download Developer Edition, which includes brand new, cutting-edge tools for those who build the web. So much has changed about Firefox these past few years, and even more is in store. To learn more about Firefox Quantum in November, visit our page and we’ll keep you up to date on the latest news. We’re super excited to get Firefox Quantum to our beta users and hope you’ll give it a try. The post Start Your Engines – Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition appeared first on The Mozilla Blog. [Less]

The first embedded conference in Paris