Top reasons to switch from chrome to firefox quantum

Firefox is a browser with a great story behind it, the first version appeared on November 9, 2004 and since then it has been one of the most important web browsers. 2017 has been a major turning point with the arrival of Firefox Quantum, a long-awaited renewal after many years in the shadow of Google Chrome. Is it worth switching from Chrome to Firefox Quantum? We will tell you if this is the case and what are the main reasons.

Index of contents

Main improvements of Firefox Quantum and why you should try it

Firefox is a browser with a great history behind it, this project started with Phoenix, which we can consider as a preliminary version of Firefox and that looks totally different from what Mozilla's browser is today. This Phoenix has a GTK style inherited directly from the Gnome 2.0 of that time, surely many remember. Phoenix is ​​still available in version 0.1 but its limitations in TLS and HTTPS make it very little usable today. Phoenix took over from Netscape, a browser that had come to face Internet Explorer but could not do anything against the then absolute king of web browsing. Finally, in 2004 what was born from that moment on would be Firefox, an Open Source project that had the intention of fighting against Internet Explorer from you to you.

Firefox had a great evolution since its arrival on the market with the new versions Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 in a period from 2004 to 2008, because back then the competition was not even the shadow of what it is today and the progress was much slower. In these years, technologies such as Gecko and JavaScript arrived. Finally in 2011 Firefox 4 arrived at a time when Google Chrome was already settling and from there everything began to change.

Firefox managed to surpass Internet Explorer in 2015 but did not get the coveted crown, this honor was held by Chrome, which became the most used browser in a few years since its first version. Chrome's weapons were its minimalist design, its high speed and its good work. In addition, he introduced the parallelization and the isolation of the processes in several tabs, something that today is the most common.

In the face of so much competition from Chrome Mozilla, it has had to put its batteries with Firefox, which has caused the browser to enter a cycle of frenetic updates in recent years, something that culminated in 2017 with the arrival of Firefox Quantum. This new version comes with very important news with which Mozilla will try to convince users who have gone to Chrome and new users who are coming to this world.

Firefox Quantum vs Google Chrome Which is faster?

Once we have made an introduction in the context of switching from Chrome to Firefox Quantum we will review the main improvements that Mozilla has introduced in Firefox Quantum and why you should give the new web browser a chance.

Process parallelism and lightning speed

Firefox Quantum introduces a new rendering engine called Servo that has been designed from the ground up to be able to take better advantage of the features of today's hardware. This new engine is capable of taking advantage of all the threads of the processor so it can handle a large number of processes in a much more efficient way, this allows the browser tabs to be isolated in several independent processes and if one stops responding it does not affect the rest. Firefox Quantum divides all the tabs into a maximum of four independent processes, in this way it bets for parallelism, but not in such an extreme way as Chrome that handles each tab in a process and does not have a process limit. Firefox's approach to this philosophy allows it to be more efficient than Chrome in using system resources while remaining very stable and robust.

Clean aesthetics for a more pleasant interface

The external appearance is very important and the Mozilla team knows it perfectly, so they have renewed the interface of Firefox Quantum to catch up and offer a much more minimalist and simple aspect. Furthermore, this new browser is highly customizable from the menu so that each user can adapt it to their preferences and tastes.

Renewed extensions

All the changes that have been introduced in Firefox Quantum internally make the way of managing extensions very different, which is why new WebExtensions have been introduced that are capable of taking full advantage of the features of the new Servo rendering engine. Older extensions may work, but compatibility is not guaranteed.

Efficiency in every way

Firefox Quantum has been designed to be very efficient in every way, from the use of system resources we have already discussed, but there is much more. Tracking Protection technology is able to reduce HTTP cookies during visits to websites by 67% by blocking requests from domains that monitor our activity on the web. This means that 39% less data is used and therefore allows content to load faster, all are improvements in this new Firefox Quantum.