A few weeks ago the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox Quantum. It’s about time!

Firefox has been around since 2003 as the successor to Netscape Navigator. If you remember the Browser Wars of the late 90’s you will recall Microsoft Internet Explorer and Navigator battled it out for how people would view the web. Web developers would post best viewed in Netscape or IE logos on their websites. Eventually Web Standards emerged to try to reign in the madness and the Browser Wars became a distant memory. In 2008 Google introduced Chrome and it slowly overtook Firefox to become the dominant browser.

I have always liked Firefox for one reason, the bookmark sidebar. Because of that I could not let go of it. I would use Google Chrome to develop with because of it’s suite of developer tools but I used Firefox to browse the web. Unfortunately Firefox had a huge memory leak problem. The longer you ran it and the more tabs you had open the more memory it would eat up. The only way to correct this was to restart the browser. I couldn’t give up my side bookmark bar so I kept using it.

Firefox Quantum has renewed my faith in the Mozilla Foundation. They have promised fixes to the memory issue for a long time and they have finally delivered. For me Quantum uses 20% of the memory that the previous version did. I also get to keep my bookmark sidebar. If you abandoned Firefox a long time ago I recommend downloading and giving it a try again. You won’t be disappointed.