Mozilla announces 'quantum project', new engine for firefox

Mozilla currently uses the web rendering engine called Gecko in its Firefox browser. This engine dates back to the Netscape era, back in 1997 and since then it has been updated and incorporated new technologies. Mozilla is now announcing the Quantum Project, which is a new web rendering engine that will replace Gecko.

Quantum project will arrive Firefox at the end of 2017

Hand in hand with Mozilla engineering platform leader David Bryant, Project Quantum is a new web rendering engine to be released in late 2017, meaning the 'retirement' of the Gecko engine after 20 years.

The new engine is written from 0 in the Mozilla labs but will also have part of the Servo code (The Parallel Browser Engine Project) that harnesses all the power of multithreaded processors today. The new engine will be used in computers and mobile devices taking advantage of multicore processors to perform parallel processes much faster, the pages should load with more speed.

Gecko is currently written in the C ++ programming language but with the new engine that will come with Project Quantum, the new Rust language will be used. This will allow a substantial improvement in memory consumption, one of the most important defects of current browsers.

Mozilla intends for the new rendering engine to reach Android, Windows, Mac, Linux and iOS simultaneously. Mozilla has opened a Wiki of the project where they detail much more about Quantum and where we can track their progress.