If you haven’t given Mozilla Firefox a morsel of thought over the past few years, you can be excused. The once dominating internet browser has fallen from its lofty heights to a mere meagre 14% of market share according to StatCounter, an analytics firm. The current supreme leader of internet browsers is Google Chrome, a browser that retains just over 58% of market share, making it nearly ubiquitous across all platforms.
However, Mozilla Firefox is looking to regain some of that market share and some dignity back with their new upgrade that they’ve started rolling out to half of their users, “Electrolysis”. The accelerated adoption of Electrolysis is due to the success of a beta test Mozilla ran less than a month ago. Due to the positive results, Mozilla is rolling out Electrolysis (also known as Firefox 48 or multi-process Firefox), from the one percent of original test users to nearly half of their consumer base. You may be wondering, why only half, why not all? According to Mozilla, the reason is because they can’t. Only half of the current configurations of installed Mozilla Firefox’s are compatible with the upgrade. It turns out that one of Firefox’s biggest draws, add-ons, are responsible for the hindrance. However, Mozilla has a plan.
The company plans to work with developers to help upgrade their add-ons and has added a new mechanism similar to Google Chrome to help overcome this obstacle. Unfortunately, those developers that don’t upgrade their add-ons, or who have abandoned them, will see those add-ons be blocked sometime near the middle of next year, paving the way for everyone to upgrade to Mozilla Firefox 48.
Electrolysis brings a burst of speed when compared to the existing version of Firefox; it increases browser responsiveness 400 percent for ordinary websites and 700 percent for complex ones with many elements. It does this by splitting Firefox up into different processes, a method similar to what Google Chrome employs. The Electrolysis update also brings a fresh coat of paint to the Firefox UI; the search toolbar now displays more results when typing in a query. The discovery pane also gets a toned down appearance and now lets you install add-ons with a simple click.
Security upgrades have also been implemented when it comes to downloads and potentially unwanted programs. Electrolysis will be rolling out to Windows users first, with Mac and Linux coming shortly after.
Source: Mozilla
