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Firefox is ready to take on Chrome with much faster and lighter 'Quantum' browser

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CIOL Writers
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Mozilla and Oath file suit against each other over Firefox's default search engine

Mozilla, on Tuesday launched its next-generation browser Firefox Quantum that is faster, clocking in at twice the speed of Firefox 52 from March, according to the Speedometer 2.0 benchmark, and lighter with a completely new user interface, Photon.

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Firefox Quantum, also called Firefox 57, is "by far the biggest update we’ve had since we launched Firefox 1.0 in 2004,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Firefox Quantum is over twice as fast as Firefox from 6 months ago, built on a completely overhauled core engine with brand new technology stolen from our advanced research group, and graced with a beautiful new look designed to get out of the way and let you do what you do best.”

Firefox was one of the fastest growing Internet browsers in the late 2000s. But it lost momentum as Google Chrome, which is the leading US browser on desktops, gained new users. With Quantum, Firefox is looking to reclaim some of its lost glory.

Mozilla claims that Quantum is faster than Google Chrome on a number of popular websites, including Google search, Google’s login page, Wikipedia, Bing, Tumblr and Shutterstock. But it's not just the speed, Mozilla has equipped Firefox Quantum with a new user interface called Photon.

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“To create Photon, our user research team studied how people browsed the web,” says Mozilla. “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.”

Interestingly, Firefox Quantum will now be having Google as its default search engine and not Yahoo across the US and Canada. Quantum will also have 60 search providers pre-installed across more than 90 languages which, according to Mozilla, is the largest variety of search providers when compared to any other browser. The browser has also been modified to prioritise the tab you are working on over all other open tabs.

Firefox Quantum is currently available on Windows, Mac and Linux, with iOS and Android versions set to arrive in the future.

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