Alongside the Chrome 58 stable release, Mozilla has released Firefox 53 in the stable channel for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. While desktop users can download it right away from Firefox.com, Android users will see a slow roll out, and can check Google Play for an update.
The new version brings two new themes for desktop, and one feature that looks to further its Project Quantum goals - the company’s concept future browser. Calling it the Quantum Compositor, the feature is essentially meant to reduce browser crashes. ”The compositor determines what you see on your screen by flattening into one image all the layers of graphics that the browser computes, kind of like how Photoshop combines layers. Because the Quantum Compositor runs on the GPU instead of the CPU, it’s super-fast. And, because of occasional bugs in underlying device drivers, the graphics compositor can sometimes crash. By running the Quantum Compositor in a separate process, if it crashes, it won’t bring down all of Firefox, or even your current tab,” the company notes in its blog.
Firefox claims that the compositor reduces browser crashes by 10 percent. For now, the Quantum compositor will be enabled only for Windows 10, 8, and 7 with the Platform Update, and on computers with graphics cards from Intel, Nvidia, or AMD. Mozilla notes that "graphics compositing is already so stable on macOS that a separate process for the compositor is not necessary."
Firefox 53 also introduces a redesigned interface for managing website permissions, and HTML5 audio and video content also receives a new look. The two new themes mentioned earlier are called - Compact Light and Compact Dark.
The full changelog for Firefox 53 can be found below:
Firefox 53 for Android brings one big new feature called Compact tabs. This new tab essentially displays all your open tabs in two columns making it easy for you to switch. This new feature can be enabled from Settings -> General on your Android app.
The entire changelog for Firefox 53 on Android is below:
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