Mozilla's supercharged Firefox, backed by Project Quantum, will hit Android with version 58

The potential of Mozilla‘s Project Quantum is exciting, isn’t it? By all accounts, this could provide a big step forward in browser performance, a success Mozilla badly needs if it wishes to claw back some market share from Google Chrome. While the core of this Project Quantum functionality will arrive in the desktop version of Firefox 57 (known as Firefox Quantum) on November 14, we’ve now learned that it will take until Firefox 58 to see it on Android.

The news arrives via Android Police, which noted that, while the speed increase won’t make it to mobile in version 57, several other features from the desktop variant will. These include Firefox’s new user interface redesign, known as Photon, which delivers, among other things, square tabs (rather than the current rounded ones) and a new address bar.

Though the news that Firefox 57 on Android will be a step behind its desktop counterpart may be disappointing, the benefits might prove to be worth the wait. Firefox Quantum is said to be twice as fast as Firefox 49 from last year, and use 30% less memory than Google Chrome. In a Medium post on the subject from last October, David Bryant, Head of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, said: “We are striving for performance gains from Quantum that will be so noticeable that your entire web experience will feel different. Pages will load faster, and scrolling will be silky smooth.”

In other recent Firefox news, the Firefox version 56 beta that hit Android recently finally dropped support for Adobe Flash. It seems Mozilla has its foot firmly on the gas right now.

When exactly Firefox 58 will arrive on mobile remains to be seen, but you can expect it to at least be later than mid-November. Sign up for Firefox Quantum notifications, read more about it, and try out the beta version right here.