Mozilla Firefox had a bad reputation in the past few years. It’s painfully slow and it can’t seem to catch up with Google Chrome at all. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox Quantum: a browser that aims to be fast for good. It claims to use less memory and to be faster than ever. Are they right to claim that or is it just bogus? Find out in my Firefox Quantum quick review!
Note: Mozilla made Firefox Quantum available to the public last week. I only got to spend a few days with the Mac version. Here’s my quick review!
User Interface
The user interface feels more like Firefox is a new browser rather than a simple update. It feels fresh and new. It really looks like a modern browser. There’s nothing really special about the UI though. Even though it’s simple, I think they really focused more on something else. That is NOT the point of this version. What I’m really happy about Quantum is…
Performance
YES. This is THE REASON to upgrade to Firefox Quantum. With the new engine Mozilla made, Firefox can now really hang with Chrome. I don’t know right now if Chrome really is faster. All I know is that Firefox feels faster than Chrome! I never felt that about Firefox in a long time now.
As you can see in this BaseMark tests I did for both Chrome 62 and Firefox Quantum (Version 57), they are neck and neck. Firefox is just as good, if not better, than Chrome is! Based on this alone, you should give Firefox another try.
Battery Life
I didn’t notice this as much, but I think this version of Firefox doesn’t hurt the battery as much. I notice when using Chrome that it really really eats up my MacBook Air’s battery. In the short time I tried Firefox, I didn’t complain as much with the battery. I know it’s just a few days. I’ll give you guys an update after a month or two as I’m using it full time. 🙂
Final Verdict
To those who left Firefox because of how slow it was before, NOW‘s a chance to come back. Mozilla went back to the drawing board to build a fast and modern browser and it shows. Firefox Quantum is a big upgrade over the previous versions. If you’re looking for an alternative to Chrome on the Mac (and outright HATE Safari), you should try this browser. I mainly tried this version on a Mac since it’s my current laptop, but I have it on my work computer. I’ll update this review with my thoughts on the Windows version too.
That is it for my quick review of Firefox Quantum! Have you ever used the Firefox web browser? If you left for Chrome, would you consider trying Firefox again? Let me know in the comments below!