Firefox Quantum Project

Recently Mozilla has released the first significant piece of Quantum Compositor. Quantum is Mozilla’s next-generation web engine building on the Gecko engine.

If you are a layman or unfamiliar with the concept of web engine, it’s the core of the browser that runs all the content you receive as you browse the web.

In this release, Mozilla extracted a core part of their browser engine, the graphics compositor. It runs in a separate process from the main Firefox process. The compositor determines what you see on your screen by flattening into one image all the layers of graphics that the browser computes, kind of like how Photoshop combines layers. Mozilla’s blog says Quantum compositor reduced browser crashes by about 10%. Because it runs as a separate process, if it crashes, it won’t bring down all of the Firefox or even your current tab and also, it speeds up Firefox. Still, Quantum compositor needs to improve a lot. We can expect the continuous improvement and stable releases from Firefox in upcoming days