[_frog]

For those not following Firefox development too closely, there's a few major projects in the works right now:

- Stylo, the new CSS styling engine currently enabled for a percentage of Nightly users

- WebRender, a new GPU-based rendering engine that's currently in much earlier stages

- Quantum, an initiative to improve Firefox's real and perceived performance (there's a bunch of smaller initiatives that compose this, like Quantum Flow and Quantum DOM)

- Photon, a project to redesign and modernise the Firefox UI

Most (but not all) of these projects are aiming to ship with Firefox 57 later this year, but you can check them out now in Nightly. I've been using it for a few weeks and the difference is really night and day, huge props to all the Firefox contributors.

[nnethercote]

Strictly speaking, Stylo and WebRender fall under the Quantum project umbrella, as "Quantum CSS" and "Quantum Render", respectively. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum has details. (The names are definitely confusing!)

Also, Quantum Flow is not so small! It's actually now the part of Quantum that's getting the highest priority and most resources. It doesn't involved any single component, but is rather a focused effort to relentlessly profile Firefox on real-world workloads and eliminate as many noticeable slowdowns (jank, stutters, pauses, spinning beachballs, etc.) as possible. It's been hugely effective, with noticeable speed-ups in each release from Firefox 54 to 57. Ehsan Akhgari's blog has more details: https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog