For those interested in web browsers: Firefox has just released a new rebuilt version called ‘Firefox Quantum’, which is reportedly faster than Google Chrome.
Google Chrome’s speed has been a notable factor in its successful campaign of getting users to switch over to it. At present, Chrome virtually dominates the market with, at the time of writing, roughly 50% share – leaving all the other browsers to fight for scraps amongst each other.
As a web designer, I can tell you the only reason why Chrome seems fast is because of its aggressive caching. Even if you press F5 to reload a page, Chrome pretends to reload, but actually just reloads the old version of the page. This is infuriating when you’re trying to show a client test iterations of a website and they have to constantly manually clear their cache to see every little change. On a PC browser, holding Ctrl + F5 will force a cache clear, but that’s not possible when your client is viewing with Chrome on a mobile phone (which an increasing number do).
Firefox claims its new speed is due to them rebuilding the engine from scratch. At first, I was sceptical and thought that perhaps they too have started aggressive caching, but in my preliminary tests, this does not appear to be the case. I would therefore endorse it over Chrome, and hopefully they start to gain back a large portion of the market like they once had, and more.
One thing remains unchanged though…
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Article by Roxane Lapa of .COZA Web Design