
Firefox Quantum DOM Cooperative Threading Design - jhatax
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MZhF1zB5_dk12WRiq4bpmNZUJWmsIt9OTpFUWAlmMyY
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jhatax
Firefox 57 has its share of detractors among the HN crowd, particularly those
who want XUL extensions to continue to live on. I am not in that camp; I think
Firefox is fighting for its future, and I like that my browser of choice is
closing the performance gap with Chrome.

The 57 release is chock full of great features and performance optimizations.
Ehsan Akhagari manages a critical initiative, called Quantum Flow, and he
publishes a weekly newsletter that chronicles performance improvements in
Firefox on his blog [1].

In the recent newsletter [2], he mentioned "Quantum DOM Cooperative
Threading", a feature that has landed in Firefox Nightly, but is disabled for
now so that issues can be fixed. To quote Ehsan on the project's goals:

"... this past week the first implementation of our cooperative preemptive
scheduling of web page JavaScript, more commonly known as Quantum DOM, landed.
The design document describes some of the background information which may be
helpful if you need to understand the details of how the new world looks
like."

This combined with other efforts -- such as de-prioritizing background tabs,
event queues, and lazy loading -- should significantly improve Firefox's
perceived performance.

If you haven't given Nightly a try, I suggest that you do.

1\. [https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog](https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog)

2\. [https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2017-09-01/quantum-flow-
engine...](https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2017-09-01/quantum-flow-engineering-
newsletter-22)

