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Firefox Mobile gets faster as Mozilla updates it with new Browser Engine with Quantum Speed

by Felix Omondi
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Mozilla ended 2017 by upgrading its desktop browser with Quantum; that was perhaps the biggest update Firefox has received in its history. Browsing on Firefox on desktop got a lot faster, so much so that some people ditch Chrome; people are throwing words saying it has even surpassed Chrome in speed.

However, users on mobile have been waiting since the turn of the year to get the Quantum update on their Firefox mobile browser as well. Well, the long wait is now over as Mozilla issues an update to the Android Firefox mobile browser to include Quantum.

It would appear Mozilla Foundation is tired of being known as the good (privacy-wise) but slow browser. With the release of Firefox mobile v60.0, comes the Quantum and hopefully it will not be anything less than the desktop version with regards to speed. The browser is now no longer Firefox Mobile but Firefox Quantum.

Out with Gecko and in with Servo but Quantum carried the day

Firefox in all its years has been built on Gecko, a browser engine that was initially created for Netscape back in 1997. Despite its full-features (plenty of extensions and themes), Firefox has been notoriously slow. Especially when Chrome came with such high standard of browser’s speeds.

Though Mozilla Foundation is widely respected for its respect to user’s privacy and security. Its browser has been losing market share because, when it gets down to it, speed trumps privacy for most people. Hence the popularity of Chrome, which is just another big funnel for harvesting data for Google.

Mozilla has now shifted from Gecko to Servo, which began as a project that led to the discovery of a vastly superior browser engine. The experiment works on Servo started back in 2013, and in its three years run, Mozilla realized that it would take a long time to bake any products developed out of this browser engine properly. So Mozilla branched off into a new project, Quantum.

Quantum is built on a lot of the stable portions of the Servo project and went ahead to integrate them into the Firefox browser making Firefox Quantum.

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