Firefox Quantum. Firefox—you know, that web browser you used to use—is fast again. Mark Mayo for the Mozilla Blog:

The first thing you’ll notice is the speed. Go on, open some tabs and have some fun. The second thing you’ll notice is the new User Interface (UI). We call this initiative Photon, and its goal is to modernize and unify anything that we call Firefox while taking advantage of the speedy new engine. You guessed it: the Photon UI itself is incredibly fast and smooth. To create Photon, our user research team studied how people browsed the web. We looked at real world hardware to make Firefox look great on any display, and we made sure that Firefox looks and works like Firefox regardless of the device you’re using. Our designers created a system that scales to more than just current hardware but lets us expand in the future.

Along with switching between Safari and Chrome, I’ve been running the beta of Firefox Quantum for a few weeks. Here are a few notes on my experience:

• Firefox really does feel faster than Chrome or Safari. Noticeably faster.
• The new UI is good. It gets out of the way, especially if you set the density to “compact”.
• It’s from Mozilla, who I trust.
• You can see a site’s favicon in the tab. C’mon, Safari.
• The web inspector is, bar none, the best out of the three major browsers.

If you haven’t tried Firefox since Chrome came out, or you’ve always used your operating system’s default browser, I’d encourage you give the new Firefox a shot. It’s free and I was left genuinely surprised.

Tuesday, 14 November 2017