Firefox 57 promises a Quantum leap in performance

Mozilla is distributing version 57 of its Firefox browser. This is the first mainstream release that makes use of the Project Quantum improvements, it uses a new engine and has an updated design. The browser maker claims Firefox 57 is twice as fast as its predecessors and uses 30 percent less memory than Google's Chrome. Among other things, it has better multi-core support and features a lot more optimizations.

The central advancement for Project Quantum was parallelism, the benefits of which we’d seen with Servo, our high-performance browser engine project. The clear throughput and performance advantages of Servo convinced us we could create a new web rendering engine for Firefox with unprecedented security and responsiveness.

Servo unlocks your machine to give you the best web experience using modern techniques to take full advantage of today’s hardware. A large part of that is because we built it leveraging Rust, a safe and fast programming language pioneered at Mozilla to do a better job utilizing today’s multi-core processors. With Rust you get speed, memory safety and parallelism under its aptly true tagline of “Fearless Concurrency.”

A full run-down of what's new can be found at Mozilla's Firefox page.