// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Firefox 155 Adds 2 New Changes for Faster Web Browsing
In a very low-key manner, Firefox 155 has arrived as the latest stable release for the popular privacy-focused web browser.
While there are a range of refinements with this release, we will be focusing on two technical ones that change how Firefox handles webpage loading. Happy Eyeballs v3 and QUIC v2 support for HTTP/3.
Instead of testing one path and hoping it works, Firefox now tries a handful of ways to reach a website side by side and goes with whichever one answers first. There's nothing to turn on and nothing to configure. You'll just notice fewer pages that sit there loading while Firefox figures out how to actually get through to the site.
You see, every time Firefox loads a page, it first has to decide how to reach the server behind it.
And there's often more than one option. An IPv4 address, an IPv6 address, sometimes both, and depending on the site, a choice between HTTP/2 and the newer HTTP/3. Older Firefox versions picked one option and waited to see if it worked before trying the next, so a slow or broken first guess meant the page just sat there without loading.
Happy Eyeballs v3 is what changes that. Firefox fires off connection attempts down several of these paths at once and runs with whichever one lands first, instead of committing to a single guess at the beginning.
Officially, Happy Eyeballs v3 is still an IETF draft rather than a finished RFC, authored by engineers at Apple and Google. Mozilla's own developer notes for this release describe the feature as currently supported on some platforms only, without naming which ones.
QUIC is one of the pieces of tech behind how fast a website loads today, and Firefox 155 adds support for a slightly newer version of it.
What actually matters isn't the new version itself. It's that Firefox can switch to it instantly, skipping the back and forth that normally happens when two computers don't immediately agree on which version to use.
That back-and-forth used to cost an extra trip across the internet and back. Now it doesn't.