Firefox Quantum is the name chosen by Mozilla to indicate version 57 of the browser. The new name is used to indicate a crucial step in the evolution of Firefox, which will be completely renewed with version 57 and will adopt news that will allow it to achieve much higher performance than now.
At the base of Firefox Quantum, we find a rendering engine written in Rust, specifically designed to work on multiple cores and with more than one thread. The main advantage of this rewriting lies in speed: the new engine is much faster than the previous one, according to tests conducted by Mozilla and published in an article on his blog.
Mozilla says that Firefox Quantum manages to be faster than Chrome while consuming 30% less memory.
Firefox Quantum will also receive an update of the interface, called Photon and designed to be used on devices equipped with mouse and keyboard and touch-sensitive screens. Unlike previous versions, the interface should adapt dynamically to the screen on which it is used and to the type of input.
A beta of Firefox Quantum is already available and can be downloaded from the Mozilla site.