Since people keep raving about it, I took the Firefox Quantum Beta for a test drive today. The final version is supposed to be released in November. Like many people I’ve switched from Firefox to Chrome many years ago. I tried Firefox out a few times again over the years, but aside from the speed issues I just much prefer the Chrome developer tools, so I always went back to Chrome.
However, since Firefox Quantum is supposed to be twice as fast as the current Firefox and therefore faster than Google Chrome, I had to check it out. The browser itself feels snappy, but honestly I rarely see slow websites, even on my Mac Mini which is not exactly a fast computer.
The only exception is sites with lots of Gifs. So I put Firefox to the test on Tumblr’s Gif page, which always made Chrome stutter while scrolling on my Mac Mini. And no, I don’t use Tumblr, but it’s the only site I can think of that I’ve seen where I would have wanted a faster browser.
And the result with Firefox Quantum is… Amazing! It handles the site without a hitch. Smooth scrolling all the way, even after scrolling down many pages full of Gifs.
Looks like they really did a great job of optimizing here. All the sites I tried were really fast. I didn't try any benchmarks myself, they've already been done, yes it is even faster in those, but I personally prefer to see the results on actual websites I might use, benchmarks can be misleading.
Like I said, I prefer Chrome’s developer tools so I don’t know if just more speed is going to make me switch to Firefox any time soon, but I’ll keep trying it out for a while, who knows, maybe I’ll even get used to the Firefox developer tools :)
I do love the screenshot function, which lets you easily take screenshots of websites and even upload them and host them on a Firefox website with just a single click. By default the screenshots get deleted after 14 days, but you can change that to hours, day, weeks, years or even indefinitely. The pictures in this post were actually made using this screenshot function and are hosted on Firefox’s new screenshot website.
If you have already tried the browser out yourself, I’d love to hear about your experience with it. Do you like it? Enough to switch from Chrome or whatever browser you are currently using? Or did you always use Firefox? Tell me in the comments!
You can download Firefox Quantum Beta here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/quantum/