Firefox Quantum - reclaim your internet!

Firefox Quantum - reclaim your internet!

Firefox has a long story of fighting monopolies, arguably bad business practices and of course developers and freedom via initiates like Tor Anonymous Browser.

Its quite ironic if we say that the browser has raised again from the ashes.

A Brief history of Firefox

Perhaps author should call it as a brief of history of me and firefox. In early 2000's the author had the opportunity to manage internet access to students in the university's main computer center. We introduced graphical thin clients to students or rather upgraded to graphical terminals from the old school black white monitors. This means students were browsing with browsers like netscape and newly launched Opera. Tabbed browsing was just getting started. Though there was a problem -- the thin clients were just handling the display and computation was handled by the servers. With some 100 users or using Opera soon it became clear that we need a better solution. Mozilla was tried but it was very heavy. So one day the author searched for something like "cut-down version of Mozilla" and stumbled on Phoenix!

(From : A Visual Browser History, from Netscape 4 to Mozilla Firefox)

So needless to say, Phoenix was the fastest browser in town and since we were mostly using Redhat Linux at that point of time, this was very comfortable. Before Mozilla Foundation, one the first browser makers were Netscape and was founded by the now very successful Anderson and Horowitz who holds major stakes in tech giants like Facebook. Unfortunate for Netscape Microsoft started bundling Internet Explorer browsers with Windows and it soon jeopardized Netscape. Eventually Netscape Open Sourced, or in simple terms gave the source code to Mozilla foundation which started building browser under various Mozilla brands.

The Dawn of Firefox

(Firefox 0.9 came out with the brand new logo!)

In 2004 Mozilla rebranded and launched a clean and Elegant browser by the name Firefox. It then became the best browser for everyone from grandmothers to developers to activists. As the popularity and plugins / ad-dons grew, Firefox got heavier and had a very large CPU and memory foot print. Soon it became the software everyone likes to hate but still used. Google saw the opportunity and came up a graphic novel.

Google's Graphic Novel

We all know that Google is a very successful internet advertising company with ventured into products like Android phones. Its not be entirely wrong to say that Google also wrote one of the most successful graphic novels of all time. Well, at-least one had impacted and indirectly read by the largest number of people in the world.

The Novel was titled Google Chrome!

(Here is the fully book)

With Firefox loosing the battle, Chrome captured the market.

The death of Internet

Internet was originally invented as a means to share academic research (at CERN) and it took the masses to the world of information, knowledge, economic opportunities and without doubt the free flow of information and knowledge has re-shaped humanity. While all this happens many saw the opportunity and multinationals starting from academic research publishers, Google, Facebook and many others created "walled jails of knowledge" where the knowledge is no more free but one has to sell ones privacy to the advertisers or pay for access. Companies like Facebook & Google are also working on mobile platforms in addition to insta articles, AMP project which completely sucks information into the massive data mining black holes owned and operated by the multinationals.

While browsers like Chrome is open source, with their massive user based companies are able to control and publish features on their websites (eg: Google products not working well with Opera) which in-turn benefits the companies in their data mining efforts. There has to be a independent third party that values our freedom and privacy and whose primary business is not to collect ones data and thus use it to show targeted advertisements.

This is where a browser like Firefox which is built by a non-profit organization with goals to promote freedom and supports project like Tor, EFF matters.

What has changed in Firefox ?

Before getting into what has changed, its important to quickly review what was the issue if there was anything. To begin with, Firefox is based on a code base which is nearly 2 decades old and from the days of the advent of internet, many things have changes. The web started having more media, CSS, JavaScript and other functionalities.

(This image from shows the increase in size of the websites. The computational complexity might have show an exponential trend!)

If the above diagram of web page sizes is taken as a basis for the increase in complexity of the web pages, this can be also used to explain what Firefox was fighting. To make matters worse, now we using tabbed browsing as well.

To address the new challenges, the Mozilla team took way too long though this is not something that can be easily pardoned in today's past paced world, the results are not just short amazing. To Mozilla team's credit, they even created a new system programming language called Rust which is even in the list of possible contenders which will replace C programming language. [reference]: https:// "The long goodbye to C - Eric S Raymond".

Firefox calls the massive project Quantum and some parts of the long and complex project is now bundled into Firefox Version 57 and Mozilla is making this to general public under the brand name Firefox Quantum. Various benchmarks shows phenomenal performance improvements. The author is using, testing and often raising bugs using the Firefox Nightly program and running regression testing for few months now.

The new version is noticeably faster and has a very low memory foot print. There are also new advanced features like sand-boxing and containers which are very handy as well.

Why Firefox ?

The need of an independent party is very important and with all the short comings and arguably receiving funds from numerous organizations which included Google (atleast in the past), Mozilla and firefox is the best alternate and choice we have.

You will see the final release of Firefox Quantum via news outlets within next couple of days. If you are ready to start right now, the beta version (which is very stable IMHO) is here

Note that the author is in no way associated with Mozilla and this personal opinion & it will be good for all the internet users if you can share this content within and outside of Steemit.