Soon, a rendering engine of new generation in Firefox – 01net.com

While a more powerful Firefox, based on the architecture of Electrolysis, is in the process of getting on our computers, Mozilla has been planning the step after that. And this is called Quantum. This project wants to push the philosophy of Electrolysis until the end. As a reminder, this technical architecture allows to divide the process of the browser into several sub-processes, each of which supports one or more web pages. This distribution of tasks enables to gain substantially in performance.

The goal of the Quantum project is to replace the current Gecko rendering engine a rendering engine of ” the new generation “. It would be able to run a maximum of their software modules in a mode of parallel computation, as this is based on the multiple cores of the processor or on the capabilities of the graphics chip of a PC. In short, the idea is to bring parallel computing to all floors to further enhance the display performance, and thus improve the user’s experience.

take Advantage of the advanced hardware

” browsers have appeared in the PC era. These first computers had only a single-core processor (…) so They could not do one thing at a time. And even today, most browsers are still turn a web page into a single thread of execution (thread) on a single-core calculation. But today, we surf the web on phones, tablets, and laptops have cpus much more sophisticated “, ” says David Bryant, head of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, in a blog.

To create its new rendering engine, Mozilla account, above all, poke in the experimental project Servo, the purpose of which is precisely to create a browser based on parallel programming. Thus, the module CSS in Gecko (which is in charge of the management of the style sheets) will be replaced by the module CSS Servo, the code is already heavily parallelized. Ditto for the rendering module (graphics WebRender), which builds on the capabilities of parallel computation to the GPU.

Management of pages by multithreading

The management module web pages, meanwhile, comes visibly to a new development. Baptized in Quantum DOM, it’s not going to divide the pages in different processes such as Electrolysis, but in different threads of execution of processes (threads). This has the advantage not to generate an inflation of the use of the memory, as is the case when we multiply the process.
In contrast, the multithreading forced to fine-tune memory resources shared, to avoid that it all ends in chaos. It is, therefore, more complex to do.

Theoretically, the users of Firefox should not have to wait too long to experience this new rendering engine. Mozilla expects to be able to distribute the first versions in 2017, for Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. the ” One day, we hope to be able to offer it on iOS, too “, says David Bryant. It, however, it is far from being won.