Firefox Feels Like the Speed of Light

The New Firefox came out of a project we at Mozilla call “Quantum,” a massive technology implementation that modernized our web browser engine using a new programming language called Rust. And the engine is fast. Very, very fast on the inside.

What a browser looks and feels like

Where the Quantum project was used to rev up the engine, a project called “Photon” modernized and improved our outer design look and feel. Very, very fast on the outside.

And a funny thing about “fast” design: it’s a lot about perception. Light itself is made up of photons, these wave-particle tricksters that travel 300 million meters-per-second and scatter off each other by the infinity-gazillions to create what we see with our eyes.

It’s one of life’s most amazing optical illusions—all these quantums of energy given off by photons, creating the visual world we see!

What’s this got to do with Web Browsers?

It’s been about 5 years since our last browser redesign, and we used these optical design principles of “fast” in how we approached the work. The New Firefox runs super fast inside, but the way we’ve designed it outside makes it even faster—especially on phones, tablets, and other devices where you need to feel the fast.

For the curious, we’ll be talking more about the specific design features of the New Firefox over the next few weeks but the main point is it all adds up to an amazing web browser we can’t wait for you to experience.

Try the New Firefox today. See what you think! (Or is it, see what you perceive?)

This post is also available in: Deutsch (German)


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