Under the covers, the change is important, too. But making room for a bit more browser content is important, too. The themes might not seem like that big a deal but, changing a browser interface can be disorienting for people. A compact light theme also is an option, though by default Mozilla won't change the browser's look.
The compact light and nighttime-friendly compact dark themes can be selected in the "appearance" section of Firefox's about:addons setup, but Firefox sticks with the traditional look by default.įirefox introduces a new compact dark theme, at top, that does away with the swoopy tab shapes on the years-old "Australis" interface, below. Two new built-in themes drop the swoopy tabs introduced in 2013 with the Australis project in favor of more compact rectangles that don't take up as much room and that look more like what you see in Microsoft's Edge browser or Apple's Safari.
New built-in compact themesĪnother change lets people give Firefox 53 a new look. On Macs running Apple's MacOS software, compositing is stable, so the separate process isn't required.
That isolation into a separate computing process cuts down on trouble spots that can occur when Firefox employs computers' graphics chips, Mozilla said.Ībout 70 percent of Windows users will get the benefit - those using updated versions of Windows 7, 8 and 10 on machines with Intel, Nvdia and AMD graphics hardware.
To improve stability, Firefox 53 on Windows machines isolates software called a compositor that's in charge of painting elements of a website onto your screen. Firefox must keep pace if Mozilla is to keep that competitive pressure alive in the market, especially with rivals like Opera and Brave building their browsers on Google's Chrome foundations. A decade ago, the browser triumphed in a Mozilla effort to reignite browser innovation, but it's faded with the widespread shift to Google's Chrome.
The improvement comes through the first big debut of a part of Project Quantum, an effort launched in 2016 to beef up and speed up Firefox.Ĭutting crashes and boosting performance is crucial to Firefox's future. So if you're a Firefox user, you should be happy with Tuesday's release of Firefox 53, which cuts down browser crashes by 10 percent for most people on Windows computers. Nobody likes it when a web browser bombs instead of opening up a website.