The Quantum Compositor will be enabled for about 70 percent of Firefox users: those on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10 running on computers with graphics cards from Intel, Nvidia, or AMD.įirefox has received a redesigned interface for granting and managing a website’s permissions. In fact, Mozilla found that the Quantum Compositor reduced browser crashes by about 10 percent. This means Firefox is faster, because the Quantum Compositor runs on the GPU instead of the CPU, and more stable, since occasional bugs in underlying device drivers that cause crashes no longer bring down all of Firefox or even your current tab.

The graphics compositor, which determines what you see on your screen by flattening into one image all the layers of graphics that the browser computes, now runs in a separate process. Next, as part of Mozilla’s plans to build a next-generation browser engine ( Project Quantum) that takes full advantage of modern hardware, the company today shipped the Quantum Compositor for Windows. The former uses Firefox’s default theme colors, while the latter inverts them. Both shrink the user interface (also known as the chrome) size. Desktopįirst up, Firefox 53 ships with two new themes: Compact Light and Compact Dark. In other words, it’s a major platform that web developers target - even in a world increasingly dominated by mobile apps.

Mozilla doesn’t break out the exact numbers for Firefox, though the company does say “half a billion people around the world” use the browser.

Mozilla firefox 53