Firefox Quantum - using Rust for parallelized layouting
A year ago Mozilla announced Project Quantum, an effort to create a next generation browser engine, leveraging new technologies from the Servo project. With the planned release of Firefox Quantum on November 14th, several Rust components will be running within Firefox. Quantum CSS (aka “Stylo”) uses parallelism to lay out pages, making Firefox the first browser to use multiple cores for rendering. These changes have landed in Firefox Beta as well as Firefox Developer Edition and can be tested right now! See this blog post for details. With Firefox Quantum you will also get a refreshed, modern, high performance user interface.
Stay up to date and get notified when Firefox Quantum launches: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/quantum/
What comes next in Firefox Quantum?
With the release of Firefox Quantum we are not done yet. WebRender is a project that is currently being worked on. WebRender is written in Rust and uses parallelism to render websites.
Get involved and test Mozilla Quantum!
The Mozilla community is organizing testing events for Firefox Quantum.
We invite you to help us test websites from your area, head over to theFirefox Quantum Sprint website to find an event.
Open development
The Mozilla teams bringing Rust to Firefox have been busy writing about what they bring to Firefox. We assembled a collection of the most interesting blog posts for you!
Browser internals, mostly Rust
-
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/05/quantum-up-close-what-is-a-browser-engine/
-
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-engine-quantum-css-aka-stylo/
-
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/an-inside-look-at-quantum-dom-scheduling/
General engineering blog posts
-
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/fast-responsive-reliable-browser-multi-tab-age/
-
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum-developer-edition-fastest-firefox-ever/
-
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/developer-edition-devtools-update-now-with-photon-ui/