Compact Light and Dark Themes
The Firefox 53 which was in beta till now comes with a number of cosmetic changes too. It now has an option for two new preset themes – Compact Light and Compact Dark. These themes completely change the look and feel of the browser. On enabling this theme, the tabs become squarish, similar to the one seen in the Microsoft Edge.
To activate these new themes simply head to the Add-Ons section of your browser and then click on appearance. Thereafter choose any of the two themes – light or dark – depending on your taste. Besides, you can always switch back to the default theme from this add-on section just in case you don’t like any of these present themes.
Estimated Reading Time
Mozilla has also updated the reading mode of its Firefox 53 with a new feature that provides us an estimated time of reading the article. It is mentioned just below the name of the writer.
Design Overhaul
As mentioned earlier, the design changes in Firefox 53 goes beyond the addition of present themes. The site identity and the permission panels has now been completely redesigned to make them more visible. While browsing a ton of tabs on your Mozilla Firefox 53 you see a slider cropping up on top that helps scroll between tabs. This feature ensures that more details of tab is visible thereby helping you swap between them at ease. Apart from that, the audio and visual controls has received a visual overhaul. They now support WebM videos with alpha, thereby allowing developers to embed videos with transparent background onto pages.
Uses a New Quantum Compositor for Improved Graphics Stability
To improve stability on Windows devices, Firefox has started using a new Quantum Compositor in its new browser. For starters, a compositor is responsible for painting elements of a website on your screen. The new Quantum Compositor apparently makes use of the GPU capabilities of your PC to provide a fluent browsing experience. It adds a GPU processor to Firefox’s multi-process system. So any graphics related crashes from now on will not shut down the entire browser. Mozilla claims that its Quantum Compositor works on computers with Intel, AMD and Nvidia graphics that are running Windows 7 or later. With that said, the MacBooks aren’t using the new Quantum Compositor as Mozilla claims that Apple’s Mac OS offers stable graphics composting.
Ditches Support for older Windows and Mac
With the latest update, Mozilla has officially announced that it will ditch support for older version of Windows and Macs. This definitely has something to do with the new core technologies that are being used in the Firefox 53. So users still running on Windows XP, Windows Vista and 32-bit version of Mac OX 10 will no longer get major updates. They can however download Firefox 53 ESR to continue receiving security updates for yet another year. Apart from that, the browser will also stop supporting Linux computers with Intel Pentium 4, AMD Opteron or older chips.
