Mozilla has implemented a performance update to its Firefox web browser that could translate into faster website load times – welcome news for SEO professionals and their clients.
The Technical details they involve moving certain tasks, specifically gzip and brotli content decompression, away from the browser’s main processing thread.
While this may sound complex, the result is quite simple: web pages load faster and feel more responsive when using Firefox.
Network decompression (gzip, brotli) has been moved out of the main thread as part of ongoing efforts to reduce main thread contention. This work yielded huge performance gains in our top-level page load metrics, reducing FCP and LCP by 10%. look
— Firefox Nightly 🔥 (@FirefoxNightly) April 18, 2024
The Firefox development team states:
“This work has yielded huge performance gains in our top-level page load metrics, reducing first content painting and largest content painting by 10%.”
First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint measure how quickly websites make content visible to users after browsing.
Improving them by 10% could mean millions of web pages load noticeably faster in Firefox.
Why SEJ cares
For SEO professionals, websites that load quickly are crucial to providing a good user experience, which can influence search rankings.
Any measure that speeds up load times is good for SEO.
The performance upgrade has also received praise from web experts.
Barry Pollard, a respected voice on web performance, tweeted that Firefox’s thread switch “should be some nice responsiveness gains” that could improve the browser’s interactivity.
beautiful It should also gain good responsiveness for Firefox users. INP can’t be measured in Firefox at the moment, but I would have shown it if it was.
— Barry Pollard (@tunetheweb) April 18, 2024
looking ahead
In the ever-accelerating online world, reducing load times by precious milliseconds keeps websites competitive and users engaged.
As Firefox releases this updated version, expect faster load times and smoother user experiences in this browser.
Frequently asked questions
What are First Contentful Paint and Greatest Contentful Paint, and why are they important?
First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) are performance metrics used to evaluate how quickly a website presents visual content to its users after navigation.
FCP measures the time from navigation until the browser displays the first piece of DOM content, providing the user with the first visual indication that a page is loading.
LCP, on the other hand, marks the point in the page load timeline when the largest block of text or image element is rendered on the screen.
These metrics are relevant to SEO as they indicate the quality of the user experience; Faster FCP and LCP times generally correlate with a better user experience, which can positively impact search visibility.
Featured image: T. Schneider/Shutterstock
