Firefox Quantum made many Chrome users and other browsers jump to the new Mozilla proposal. The company continues to make progress to improve the experience, and Tab Warming is the best proof of that.
Normally, users complain about the large amount of resources that a browser uses. Pages are increasingly sophisticated and having multiple tabs open causes consumption to skyrocket. For this reason, developers have been looking for ways to improve the experience for years without reducing the number of pages that you may have open simultaneously.
What is Tab Warming and how can we activate it?
Tab Warming is one of Firefox’s most promising features. Although (as we have been able to verify with Quantum) Firefox already does a good management of resources, there are certain web pages that have SVG images or very heavy CSS codes that by changing them cause the computer to slow down considerably.
As explained by Mike Conley, one of the Firefox engineers who worked on the development of Tab Warming , the browser is able to analyze the movements of the user’s mouse and will begin to “paint” the contents of a tab each time we place the cursor over it.
This will happen even before clicking , so when we decide to move from one tab to another it will do so in a much more fluid way. Conely explains its operation in the following way:
“These beautiful milliseconds are used to render and load the page, so when you click, the tab is ready and waiting for you.”
Tab Warming is now available in the Nightly version (in testing phase) of the browser. Once we have downloaded it , we will have to go to the advanced configuration options by typing the following link in the address bar:
- about: config? filter = browser.tabs.remote.warmup.enabled
Once we have marked it as “true”, we simply have to close and reopen the browser so that the changes are applied.
If the tests are satisfactory, surely integrate this functionality in all versions of Firefox. At the moment we have the opportunity to test it from the development version and help report possible errors that may arise.