The main browsers prioritize the stability of our sessions, and while there’s nothing wrong with that (in fact, it’s the most logical strategy), sometimes a bit of performance is left on the table. If you’re interested in exploring that limit using experimental and alternative builds, you should start with Mercury, a fork of Firefox ESR that, in addition to receiving multiple optimizations during its compilation, also removes several secondary elements from the standard browser.
The open-source nature of browsers allows us to go beyond their official builds and explore other ideas, regardless of what happens with the engine in the background. This has given rise to very interesting projects such as Ungoogled Chromium, Mullvad Browser, and LibreWolf, each pursuing different goals.
However, today we encounter Mercury, based on Firefox ESR. Mercury is an equivalent to the Thorium Project (which uses Chromium), and has received several optimizations during its compilation, to which patches from projects like Waterfox, LibreWolf, and Ghostery are added. Its official page indicates that the user can expect between 8 and 20 percent extra performance depending on the operating system and benchmark, but the story doesn’t end there.
Testing Mercury, a Firefox fork that promises more speed
Personally, beyond the optimizations implemented by its developer (Alexander David Frick, or Alex313031 on GitHub), I also have to mention the general adjustments Mercury has received. First, all telemetry and reporting systems have been disabled. Then we find factory hardening, removal of all debugging elements, and the activation of both Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control.
Mercury removes Pocket, highlights, and suggested content, restores the top bar like ESR78, enables the use of Backspace to go back in pages, and uses GPU acceleration by default. As for the rest of the options, you’ll find an experience similar to the standard Firefox. All configuration values are there, and there is no restriction to enter about:config, so you can apply personal tweaks as you like.
Mercury is compatible with Windows 64-bit, and some flavors of Linux. Once again, the base of Mercury is Firefox ESR, and that means it will always be a bit behind in terms of version number, but it has worked very well during my tests. Link below!
Official site and download: Click here
How to download programs from GitHub: Click here
