Mozilla, Gecko Archive

Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google.

This may sound melodramatic, but it's not. The "browser engines" - Chromium from Google and Gecko Quantum from Mozilla - are "inside baseball" pieces of software that actually determine a great deal of what each of us can do online. They determine core capabilities such as which content we as consumers can see, how secure we are when we watch content, and how much control we have over what websites and services can do to us. Microsoft's decision gives Google more ability to single-handedly decide what possibilities are available to each one of us.

As of last nightly (20181115100051), Firefox now supports Wayland on Linux, thanks to the work from Martin Stransky and Jan Horak, mostly.

Before that, it was possible to build your own Firefox with Wayland support (and Fedora does it), but now the downloads from mozilla.org come with Wayland support out of the box for the first time.

Web users are increasingly turning to ad blockers to avoid ads, which are often perceived as annoying or an invasion of privacy. While there has been significant research into the factors driving ad blocker adoption and the detrimental effect to ad publishers on the Web, the resulting effects of ad blocker usage on Web users’ browsing experience is not well understood. To approach this problem, we conduct a retrospective natural field experiment using Firefox browser usage data, with the goal of estimating the effect of adblocking on user engagement with the Web. We focus on new users who installed an ad blocker after a baseline observation period, to avoid comparing different populations. Their subsequent browser activity is compared against that of a control group, whose members do not use ad blockers, over a corresponding observation period, controlling for prior baseline usage. In order to estimate causal effects, we employ propensity score matching on a number of other features recorded during the baseline period. In the group that installed an ad blocker, we find significant increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over control) and the number of pages viewed (+15% over control), while seeing no change in the number of searches. Additionally, by reapplying the same methodology to other popular Firefox browser extensions, we show that these effects are specific to ad blockers. We conclude that ad blocking has a positive impact on user engagement with the Web, suggesting that any costs of using ad blockers to users' browsing experience are largely drowned out by the utility that they offer.

Earlier today, Mozilla pushed Firefox 62 for desktop and Android. With the release, Mozilla has introduced an UI refresh for the new tabs page as well as several dialogs like for adding or editing a bookmark, several performance enhancements to speed up browsing, and some security enhancements.

The first change that users will notice is the refreshed new tab page; with Firefox 62 users can now display up to four rows of top sites, Pocket stories and highlights. Currently, you get one row of top sites, and depending on your location you may not even get shown Pocket stories. Another UI changes that you’ll notice is in the menu where you can toggle tracking protection on and off easily.

On the performance side of things, Windows users will now get improved graphics rendering without accelerated hardware using Parallel-Off-Main-Thread Painting. Additionally, support for CSS Shapes allows for richer web page layouts, and CSS Variable Fonts support allows the browser to render "beautiful typography" with a single font file.

With the latest Firefox experiment, Advance, you can explore more of the web efficiently, with real-time recommendations based on your current page and your most recent web history.

With Advance we're taking you back to our Firefox roots and the experience that started everyone surfing the web. That time when the World Wide Web was uncharted territory and we could freely discover new topics and ideas online. The Internet was a different place.

Mozilla recently hit the reset button on Firefox. About two years ago, six Mozilla employees were huddled around a bonfire one night in Santa Cruz, Calif., when they began discussing the state of web browsers. Eventually, they concluded there was a "crisis of confidence" in the web.

"If they don't trust the web, they won't use the web," Mark Mayo, Mozilla's chief product officer, said in an interview. "That just felt to us like that actually might be the direction we're going. And so we started to think about tools and architectures and different approaches."

Now Firefox is back. Mozilla released a new version late last year, code-named Quantum. It is sleekly designed and fast; Mozilla said the revamped Firefox consumes less memory than the competition, meaning you can fire up lots of tabs and browsing will still feel buttery smooth.

Content on the web is powerful. It enables us to learn new things, discover different perspectives, stay in touch with what's happening in the world, or just make us laugh. Making sure that stories like these - stories that are worth your time and attention - are discoverable and supported is central to what we care about at Pocket.

It's important for quality content like this to thrive - and a critical way it's funded is through advertising. But unfortunately, today, this advertising model is broken. It doesn't respect user privacy, it's not transparent, and it lacks control, all the while starting to move us toward low quality, clickbait content.

We believe the Internet can do better. So earlier this year, we started to explore a new model and showed an occasional sponsored story in Pocket's recommendation section on Firefox New Tab. Starting today, we're expanding this work further - now Firefox Nightly and Beta users may also see these sponsored stories. We're preparing for this feature to go fully live in May to Firefox users in the US with the Firefox 60 release.

Firefox Quantum continues to make news as Mozilla incorporates even more innovative technology into the platform. The development team behind the WebExtensions architecture is no exception, landing a slew of new API and improvements that can now be found in Firefox 59 (just released to the Beta channel).

People have noticed that Firefox is fast again.

Over the past seven months, we’ve been rapidly replacing major parts of the engine, introducing Rust and parts of Servo to Firefox. Plus, we’ve had a browser performance strike force scouring the codebase for performance issues, both obvious and non-obvious.

We call this Project Quantum, and the first general release of the reborn Firefox Quantum comes out tomorrow.

orthographic drawing of jet engine

But this doesn’t mean that our work is done. It doesn’t mean that today’s Firefox is as fast and responsive as it’s going to be.

So, let’s look at how Firefox got fast again and where it’s going to get faster.

So I'd like to tell you my version of the story of Firefox OS, from the birth of the Boot to Gecko open source software project as a mailing list post and an empty GitHub repository in 2011, through its commercial launch as the Firefox OS mobile operating system, right up until the "transition" of millions of lines of code to the community in 2016.

During this five year journey hundreds of members of the wider Mozilla community came together with a shared vision to disrupt the app ecosystem with the power of the open web. I'd like to reflect on our successes, our failures and the lessons we can learn from the experience of taking an open source browser based mobile operating system to market.

By the end of 2015 Mozilla leadership had come to the conclusion that our then Firefox OS initiative of shipping phones with commercial partners would not bring Mozilla the returns we sought. We made the first of a series of announcements about changes in the development of Firefox OS at Mozilla. Since then we have gradually wound down that work and, as of the end of July 2016 have stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS. This message recaps what transpired during that period of time and also describes what will happen with the Firefox OS code base going forward.

In the next few days, Firefox 48 Beta becomes available. If all goes well in our beta testing, we're about 6 weeks away from shipping the first phase of E10S to Firefox release users with the launch of Firefox 48 on August 2nd.

E10S is short for "Electrolysis". Similar to how chemists can use the technique called electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, we're using project Electrolysis to split Firefox into a UI process and a content process. Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer's processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won't lock up too.

Farewell Firefox OS smartphones. Mozilla today announced an end to its smartphone experiment, and said that it would stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones. It will continue to experiment on how it might work on other connected devices and Internet of Things networks.

Therefore I believe Thunderbird should would thrive best by separating itself from reliance on Mozilla development systems and in some cases, Mozilla technology. The current setting isn't stable, and we should start actively looking into how we can transition in an orderly way to a future where Thunderbird and Firefox are un-coupled. I don't know what this will look like, or how it will work yet. I do know that it needs to happen, for both Firefox and Thunderbird's sake. This is a big job, and may require expertise that the Thunderbird team doesn't yet have. Mozilla can provide various forms of assistance to the Thunderbird team via a set of the Mozilla Foundation’s capabilities.