Firefox 48 Comes With Electrolysis And Rust

Firefox 48 Finally Available For Download, Comes With Electrolysis And Rust

Short Bytes: Mozilla has finally debuted the long-awaited Firefox 48 web browser. This latest web browser is now available for download for multiple platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android. Firefox 48 brings along important changes like replacement of C++ by Rust and the introduction of multi-process.

Firefox 48 release marks the biggest change in its history in the form of multiprocess. After spending seven years in development, Firefox 48 is enabling Electrolysis to compete with Google Chrome. With this change, Firefox will gain the ability to run the rendering engines and browser shell as a separate process. Thus, a web page crash won’t be affecting the entire browser.

This delay has been caused due to Mozilla’s very own traditional extension architecture that makes it difficult to separate different processes. So, to enable multi-process in Firefox 48, Mozilla developers had to create a whole new extension system.

Talking of add-ons, Firefox also makes sure that extensions are signed. If an add-on isn’t signed and verified by Mozilla, it simply won’t work.

This rollout of the new feature is taking place in baby steps. In the upcoming days, only a fraction of users will be getting Firefox 48 that’ll have Electrolysis turned on by default. If this rollout is well-received by the users, more people will be able to use this new functionality.

After that initial period, if all looks well, we’ll ramp up to 100% of those users, which will be about half of all Firefox 48 users.

— Mozilla describes.

If you’ve downloaded the latest Firefox 48 web browser, you can check if you are into the Electrolysis group. Just type “about:support” in the address bar and look for “1/1 (Enabled by default)” in the Multiprocess Windows row.

Mozilla 48 also marks the induction of Mozilla’s homegrown Rust programming language. Rust is often considered to give the same level of performance as C++, avoiding the security flaws. So, for the first time, Firefox 48 is shipping with Rust code.

You can download Firefox 48 for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android by visitingthis link.

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