Opera 61 – Quantum of Solstice

Summertime ^one , and the browser can be speedy! Firefox 61 is now offered, and with it come new overall performance improvements that make the fox quicker than ever! Let’ s take a brief tour of the highlights:

Parallel CSS Parsing

adapted from mjfmjfmjf on flickr

Quantum CSS boosted our design system by calculating computed designs in parallel. Firefox 61 provides even more power to Quantum CSS simply by also parallelizing the parsing stage! The extra horsepower pays real payouts on sites with large stylesheets plus complex layouts.

Maintained Display Lists

Among the final steps before a page will be painted onto the screen can be building a list of everything that is going to be attracted, from lowest z-order to greatest (“ back to front” ). Within Firefox, this is called the display list , and it’ s the final chance to determine what’ s on screen before artwork begins. The display list includes backgrounds, borders, box shadows, textual content, everything that’ s about to become pixels on the screen.

Historically, the entire display list has been computed prior to every new color. This meant that if a 60fps animation was running, the screen list would be computed 60 situations a second. For complex pages, this particular gets to be costly and can lead to decreased script execution budget and, within severe cases, dropped frames. Opera 61 enables “ retained” screen lists, which, as the name indicate, are retained from paint in order to paint. If only a small amount of the web page has changed, the renderer may simply have to recompute a small portion of the display listing. With retained display lists allowed, the graphics team has noticed a near 40% reduction in fallen frames due to list building! We’ ve decided to pass those cost savings on to you, and are enabling the original work in Firefox 61.

You can dive deeper into screen lists in Matt Woodrow’ s recent write-up here on Hackers.

Pretty snazzy things, but there’ s more than just motor improvements! Here are few other the euphoric pleasures to check out in this release:

Accessibility Inspector

An excellent website is one that works for everyone! The internet platform has accessibility features cooked right in that let users along with assistive technologies make use of web content. Just like the JS engine can see plus interact with a tree of components on a page, there is a separate “ accessibility tree” that is available to aiding technologies so they can better describe plus understand the structure and UI of the website. Firefox 61 ships by having an Accessibility Inspector that lets designers view the computed accessibility tree plus better understand which aspects of their particular site are friendly to aiding technologies and spot areas where available markup is needed. Useful for spotting poorly-labeled buttons and for debugging advanced relationships annotated with ARIA .

You can study more about how to use the Accessibility Inspector in Marco Zehe’ s introductory blog post .

Speaking of DevTools…

• The tabs for every panel are now draggable, so you can place your most-used tools where you need them!
• No need to open up Responsive Design Mode to enable controlled network throttling – it’ s i9000 now also available from the best menu of the Network pane.
• See a custom property within the Inspector? Hover to see its worth. While typing css, custom qualities autocomplete, including color swatches once the value is a color.

Tab Management

One of the most popular uses of internet browser extensions is to help users much better hoard manage their open tabs. Opera 61 ships with new expansion APIs to help power users make use of tabs more powerfully! Extensions using the tabs permission can now hide and restore tabs on the browser’ s tabs bar. The hidden tabs continue to be loaded, they’ re simply not proven. Extensions for productivity and business can now swap out groups of tab based on task or context. Opera also includes an always-available menus that lists all open dividers regardless of their hidden state.

Wrapping Up

Interested in everything that’ s new or even changed in Firefox 61? You will see the Specifications or see the complete platform changelog on MDN Web Docs .

Have A Great Summertime!

1 . Within the Northern hemisphere, that is. I mean, I really hope the Southern hemisphere has an excellent summer too- it’ s simply a ways off.

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