Mozilla has launched Firefox 54 and it’s a bit of a watershed release. Mozilla has finally switched on multi-process (E10s/Electrolysis) for all users, meaning everyone will see a drastic speed increase as the workload of the browser is split from one process into four. Any heavy pages taking their time to load will now no longer impact the rest of the browser.
In its blog post, Mozilla wrote:
“With today’s release, Firefox uses up to four processes to run web page content across all open tabs. This means that a heavy, complex web page in one tab has a much lower impact on the responsiveness and speed in other tabs. By separating the tabs into separate processes, we make better use of the hardware on the computer, so Firefox can deliver you more of the web you love, with less waiting … Firefox 54 with E10s makes sites run much better on all computers, especially on computers with less memory. Firefox aims to strike the “just right” balance between speed and memory usage.”
Mozilla conducted a few tests to compare Firefox’s RAM usage against Edge and Chrome on Windows, Safari and Chrome on Mac, and Chrome on Ubuntu. It found that it consistently use less RAM than the other browsers.
Aside from the speed improvements, you might also notice the simplified download button and download status panel. The Myanmar locale has also been included.
Mozilla is now working hard on Firefox's new UI dubbed Photon. The overhaul is expected to bring a new preferences pane which will let you adjust multi-process settings.
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