In an attempt to even the playing field with competitors, Mozilla Firefox stepped up its game Tuesday by releasing an update that will increase browser speeds and cut down on memory usage.
Firefox 54 has opened up its upper limit of processes from one to four, although users can customize it to be more by entering “about:config” in the address bar and adjusting the settings themselves.
This new version of Firefox feels faster and it scores higher on an online browser speed test than Chrome or Safari, even after opening 20 tabs, although it still gives the old loading sign on all of the pages. Firefox product vice president Nick Nguyen calls this upgrade “the largest change to Firefox code in our history,” according to his blog post detailing the changes.
Have you used Firefox and wondered why it was so sluggishly slow? In the tech equivalent of finding out that someone has been manually inputting thousands of accounting entries into Excel, it turns out Firefox has been relying on a single operating system process to load multiple 2.5-megabyte-sized tabs at once.