The browser market may about to become a lot more competitive.

The Mozilla Foundation today launched Firefox Quantum, a new iteration of its open-source browser hailed as the most significant release since the first stable version came out in 2004. It brings major enhancements in practically every area that counts.

At the top of the list is performance. According to Mozilla, Firefox Quantum is twice as fast as the previous version that launched in March.

Much of the credit goes to Stylo, a new engine for rendering the CSS stylesheets that shape the presentation of a web page. The software is written in Mozilla’s homegrown Rust programming language and uses multiple processor cores for work that has historically been handled with just one. The result is that the more cores a user’s computer has, the faster content should load.

Firefox Quantum also benefits from a new resource allocation mechanism that was added in together with Stylo. The feature throttles the amount of system resources made available for background tabs, which allows content on the page that the user is actively viewing to be rendered faster.

The way those tabs show up is different, too. Firefox Quantum sports a brand new interface called Photon that Mozilla has created to cement the impression of a more responsive browser. The layout brings new minimalistic controls, as well as reading recommendations that show up when the user opens a new tab. Plus, Google is now the default search engines in the U.S. and Canada. 

In practice, all these improvements should translate into a considerably smoother browsing experience. A comparison video produced by Mozilla shows that Firefox Quantum can load certain popular websites such as Wikipedia faster than Google LLC’s market leading Chrome.

Going forward, Mozilla executive Mark Mayo told CNET, the “tentative goal” is to double Firefox’s performance yet again in 2018. Such a major speed boost could give Firefox an outright advantage over Chrome in the performance department. But Google is actively working on new ways to maintain its leadership position, having most recently announced a new feature for blocking deceptive site redirects.

Image: Mozilla