Firefox is among the popular browsers used by Internet users all over the world and its growth has stagnated over time. Chrome on the other hand was behind Internet Explorer as early as February last year and it was able to take the top spot in market share two months later according to NetMarketShare.
Firefox has had a perennial problem. Unlike Chrome, Firefox used a single process to run all the tabs in a browser. If a tab was loading different types of elements like videos, animations and the likes, it could slow down all of the others which would degrade your browsing experience on Firefox.
That is why on Firefox 54, Mozilla changed the codebase on their browser so that it can use multiple processes for each tab. Firefox 54 will use up to four processes per webpage so that in the case of opening a complex site, it would have a lower impact on the responsiveness of other tabs.
Mozilla also says that Firefox 54 will run much better on all computers and especially those that have less memory and they aim to strike the right balance between speed and memory usage.
The company also did a memory usage test to compare the performance of the release when compared to other browsers. Mozilla did a test where they came to a conclusion that the 32 bit version of Firefox Beta 54 used 2.4 times less memory than Chrome Beta 59.
This is a significant step up for Firefox and it will be a while for us to see if it will improve their market share in an industry dominated by Google’s Chrome browser. Download the latest Firefox browser here.
