In the countdown to Firefox Quantum, every millisecond matters to Selena Deckelmann

Website pauses, hangs, refreshes and weird jank. If you’ve ever experienced these while browsing the Web, Selena Deckelmann, Director of Firefox Runtime, feels your pain. Her team of 80 software engineers sweats the details of Runtime, the part of Firefox’s hidden infrastructure that interprets a website’s code and makes it show up in your browser. That might sound straight-forward, but it’s highly technical engineering work. Every website in the world is built just a little differently, and the Runtime team knows that if a site shows up funky for Firefox users, some of them will rage quit and blame the browser.

“Runtime is about performance. It’s sink or swim for us,” Deckelmann said. “We came to a point where we had to really focus on fundamentals, identify exactly what was hurting our performance and execute on fixing it. It wasn’t easy. A lot of engineers — hundreds — have been doing a lot of intense work for over a year now.”

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Original article written by M.J. Kelly >