The Mozilla Foundation has been constantly evolving its Firefox web browser, most recently adding new context and discovery features, and implementing multi-processing support. Now, the organization is set to make a revolutionary new change with the announcement of Project Quantum, a new web engine for Firefox that’s aimed at delivering a “fast and smooth” experience on both desktop and mobile.

Mozilla’s project is long overdue. Most major browsers were first conceived in an era when the vast majority of websites were little more than text documents with a sprinkling of images. But these days, hundreds of websites offer fully interactive experiences with autoplaying videos, instant messaging, automatically updating articles and animated graphics that swirl around the page just some of the features we’ve come to expect.

Project Quantum is Mozilla’s effort to build a browser engine that’s better able to cope with today’s infinitely more complex websites, and is set to dramatically accelerate Firefox in the next year.

“We are striving for performance gains from Quantum that will be so noticeable that your entire web experience will feel different,” David Bryant, Mozilla’s head of platform engineering, wrote in a blog post. “Pages will load faster, and scrolling will be silky smooth. Animations and interactive apps will respond instantly, and be able to handle more intensive content while holding consistent frame rates. And the content most important to you will automatically get the highest priority, focusing processing power where you need it the most.”

It sounds as if Mozilla is building an entirely new browser, similar to what Microsoft did with its Edge browser last year. But the nonprofit organization insists that’s not the case, and is instead it’s just updating the browser with a next-generation web engine that’s better able to handle the more complex and interactive web of today.

As such, Quantum will see Firefox make extensive use of parallelization by offloading work to the graphics processing unit, which can run lots of processes rapidly in parallel. As it exploits the superior hardware capabilities of today’s devices, it should be able to deliver benefits such as faster loading pages, smoother animations and real-time interactivity, Mozilla said.

Project Quantum will see Mozilla rebuild its free and open-source web rendering engine Gecko for the modern age. In addition, Quantum will also share core similarities with the Mozilla-sponsored Servo engine, though it aims to expand the scope of that project in future iterations. Meanwhile, some parts of Quantum will be written in Rust, a system programming language that “runs blazing fast, while simplifying development of parallel programs by guaranteeing thread and memory safety,” Bryant said.

Mozilla said the Quantum engine will be introduced to Firefox on Android, Windows, Mac and Linux some time next year. Apple devices users won’t be so lucky, as Apple refuses to let app developers use anything other than WebKit for iOS.

“Quantum is an ambitious project, but users won’t have to wait long to start seeing improvements roll out,” Bryant said. “We’re going to ship major improvements next year, and we’ll iterate from there.”

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