Continuing its quest to win market share from Alphabet Inc.’s Chrome, the Mozilla Foundation today launched a new version of Firefox that brings improved performance and usability.

The release builds on the landmark upgrade that rolled out for the browser late last year under the name Quantum. It included massive speed enhancements intended to bring Firefox up to par with the long-dominant Chrome, as well as an entirely new engine for rendering graphics.

Today’s release adds two more performance-enhancing features to the mix. The first is something Mozilla calls tab warming, which enables Firefox to start rendering the contents of browser tabs when users hover their mouse over them. This allows for pages to be loaded faster once they click on them.

The tab warming mechanism is joined by an upgrade to the mechanism with which Firefox display lists. A display list is what the open-source browser uses to keep track of the borders, text and other elements that need to be shown on the user’s screen at any given moment.

Previously, Firefox had to create a new file every time something changed, for example if a user switched tabs. Today’s release brings a more resource-efficient mechanism that allows the browser to check what changed on the screen after each such action and simply add the new details to the existing display list when applicable. This removes the need to recreate everything from scratch, which improves loading times.

The other major focus of today’s release is the Firefox interface. Mozilla said that the update makes it easier to personalize the search bar for users interested in connecting to specific websites’ built-in search tools. Plus, there’s a new version of the browser’s WebExtensions programming interface that will let outside plugins hide tabs when appropriate to make the interface less cluttered.

These latest enhancements to Firefox are the fruit of a multipronged development roadmap. Besides incremental improvements to the core feature set, Mozilla is also working on longer-term projects such as Firefox Reality, a version of the browser specifically optimized to run on virtual and augmented reality headsets.

Image: Mozilla