Firefox helped make the Web more awesome in 2011. We released Firefox 4 with Sync to hundreds of millions of people worldwide; we launched Firefox for Android; added the new Firefox Aurora development channel; adopted a faster release cycle; and introduced Do Not Track to the industry. Now we’re excited to share some of the highlights of Firefox this year in facts, figures and pictures. It’s all part of our commitment to innovating on behalf of people everywhere and continuing to build a brighter future for the Web — in 2012 and beyond.
Editor’s note: Today, Mozilla, NVIDIA and YouTube announced support for 3D HTML5 video, available exclusively in Firefox. You can find the announcement here and read more details from Mozilla Director of Platform Product Management, Chris Blizzard, here. Below is an excerpt from the blog post.
Starting with Firefox 4, WebM videos encoded with 3D data will be displayed in high-quality stereoscopic 3D using NVIDIA 3D Vision hardware. 3D hardware has moved from movie theaters and into people’s homes through TVs, laptop and desktop machines. 3D video games are in wide use today. And consumer hardware that’s capable of capturing 3D photos and videos is starting to come onto the market. In fact, there are several thousand 3D videos available today on YouTube. And starting today YouTube will transcode and play these videos into the open WebM format with 3D for use with their HTML5 player. This feature is currently only available in Firefox 4. It’s our hope that other browsers will follow and add support for 3D HTML5 video as well.
This is part of our larger effort to bring open video to the Web. We’ve been glad to work with NVIDIA and YouTube on this project building the solution entirely on open standards like WebM and HTML5. Our hope is that by lowering the barrier for 3D video on the Web, we’ll see more interesting apps being build on open Web technologies.
We are excited to unveil the Web O’ Wonder website, showcasing cutting edge demos from the global Mozilla community. These shiny, new demos showcase the type of ingenuity and fun enabled by modern Web technologies.
Web O’ Wonder exhibits cool and creative ways to interact with the Web. The possibilities are unlimited, so get ready to explore the types of experiences created with modern Web technologies. This is just the beginning so check back often because we will add more demos to Web O’ Wonder each week.
In addition to the interactive demos, with Web O’ Wonder you can learn more about how each demo works, what technologies are used and check out behind the scenes video interviews with the creators.
You can read this blog post from Mozilla’s Technology Evangelist, Paul Rouget to learn more about Web O’ Wonder.
Editor’s Note: Today, Mozilla Labs posted an update on the Open Web App Ecosystem project. Included below is an excerpt from this post. You can read the full details from Director of Mozilla Labs, Pascal Finette here.
The Web needs support for the co-existence of multiple Open Web App stores, and to enable users to use applications from these stores in a consistent manner. People buy their shoes, food and music from different stores on the Web today, and we see the same need for diversity and choice with Open Web Apps. We are excited to build a truly free and open market which is the basis for innovation and fundamental to the Web.
We recently launched a project to build the infrastructure for an Open Web App Ecosystem because we want to enable many different stores to exist and work in any modern browser across devices and platforms. The Open Web App Ecosystem will allow app developers to publish apps on their own website under their own terms, and will provide opportunities for individuals and companies to develop innovative services.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”
The Mozilla community is excited to celebrate the 6th birthday of Firefox, the Web browser of choice for nearly 400 million people worldwide.
Image Credit: Gen Kanai
Mozilla was established more than 10 years ago as a non-profit organization with a mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web. Six years ago, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0 offering people a better Web experience.
Today, Firefox is available in more than 70 languages and offers an easy way for people to enjoy rich Web experiences. Nearly a quarter of Internet users choose Firefox as their trusted ambassador to the Web. More than 150 million people choose Firefox Add-ons to customize their Web experience.
The success of Firefox is due to the passionate and dedicated Mozilla community, comprised of tens of thousands of developers, localizers, testers, ambassadors and campus reps.
This year, to celebrate Firefox and the Mozilla community’s work promoting innovation, choice and openness on the Web, we ask for your help to showcase how people love and use Firefox in your part of the world. Just send us a postcard with your message about Firefox and your FoxCard will be featured in our Mountain View or Paris offices. You can even win Firefox goodies when you send in your FoxCard. Check out our FoxCards page on Facebook or Spread Firefox for more information.
If you want to know what’s next for Firefox, help us test Firefox 4 Beta and send us your feedback.
Editor’s note: On Sept. 14, Mozilla released a new JavaScript benchmark named Kraken. For more details, check out Rob Sayre’s announcement, reposted below.
We’re pleased to announce the first version of Kraken, a new browser benchmark. More than Sunspider, V8, and Dromaeo, Kraken focuses on realistic workloads and forward-looking applications. We believe that the benchmarks used in Kraken are better in terms of reflecting realistic workloads for pushing the edge of browser performance forward. These are the things that people are saying are too slow to do with open Web technologies today, and we want to have benchmarks that reflect progress against making these near-future apps universally available.
My Mozilla colleague Nicholas Nethercote pointed to Hennessy and Patterson’s “Computer Architecture” in the comments of a previous benchmark blog post on the state of benchmarks today. Hennessy and Patterson list five categories of benchmarks, from best to worst:
1. Real applications
2. Modified applications (eg. with I/O removed to make it CPU-bound)
3. Kernels (key fragments of real applications)
4. Toy benchmarks (eg. sieve of Erastosthenes)
5. Synthetic benchmarks (code created artificially to fit a profile of particular operations, eg. Dhrystone)
We think Kraken is a step in the right direction. Kraken will evolve quickly over the coming weeks and months as we build out its test suite and continue to push forward the capabilities of the open Web, as we make the workloads more realistic and varied. Of course, as with everything we do, Kraken will be free and open source and we welcome contributions and participation from the wider community.
Our testing indicates that Firefox 4 is currently more than 2.5X faster than Firefox 3.6 on Kraken 1.0. Try it out, and let us know how it works for you.
Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now available and ready for testing. This first version is filled with dozens of new features and improvements. Here are more in depth explanations of some of the Firefox 4 Beta 1 features from the Firefox team:
Firefox 4 beta 1 is here – what’s in it for web developers?, Chris Blizzard
Firefox 4 Beta 1 UI Changes, Alex Faaborg
Introducing the New Add-Ons Manager, Dave Townsend
History of the Add-Ons Manager, Dave Townsend
Firefox 4 – FormData and the new File.url object, Jonas Sicking
WebM Video Support in Firefox 4 Beta, Chris Pearce
Web Developer “Console” in Firefox 4.0 Beta 1, Dave Dahl
We will continue to share more analysis and details for new features and changes in Firefox 4 as the product develops.
For more information on Firefox 4 Beta 1:
Editor’s note: On May 28, Mozilla announced the release candidate build of the next version of Firefox, which will include the Crash Protection for “out of process plugins” feature to help create a smoother, faster and more secure browsing experience for users. Early testing shows that this feature may protect users from a significant number of the browser crashes that are commonly reported to us.
For more details, check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below.
The release candidate build of Firefox 3.6.4 is now available for download and public testing. This version fixes issues found in the previous beta of Firefox 3.6.4. If no issues are found during testing this build will be officially released as Firefox 3.6.4 final in the coming weeks.
Users who have already downloaded or opted in to previous betas should receive the latest beta as an automatic update. If you did not download the previous beta and would like to help us test this release, please download the latest Firefox 3.6.4 beta from mozilla.com.
For general information about Firefox 3.6.4 and the uninterrupted browsing feature, please see the previous beta announcement.
Editor’s note: On May 28, Firefox Sync graduated from Mozilla Labs. For more details, check out Ragavan Srinivasan’s blog announcement, reposted below.
We are excited to announce that the “Weave Sync” project from Mozilla Labs has officially graduated and is now being incorporated into the Firefox roadmap. “Weave Sync” is now named “Firefox Sync” and the service will become a feature of Firefox in an upcoming major release. Until then you can download Firefox Sync as an add-on.
In addition to graduating and changing names, the latest version of Firefox Sync, v1.3, has a few new features and developments including:
- Availability in more than 15 languages including German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese
- A simpler sign-up and setup process
- A single button to access all your remote tabs and more.
For those of you that tested Sync and gave feedback while it was a part of Mozilla Labs, thank you, this would not have happened without you. And even though this project has graduated, we are still looking for your feedback and involvement as we incorporate Sync into Firefox.
And, yes, Mozilla Labs will continue to focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences. In fact, check out the Contacts project and the Account Manager feature for some of our work there.
Finally, in case you missed the latest news, we have been working on an application for the iPhone based on the Firefox Sync technology. The app is called “Firefox Home”, and it will give iPhone users instant access to their Firefox browsing history, bookmarks, and the set of tabs from their most recent browser session, in addition to having “Awesome Bar” capability.
Set up Firefox Sync on your desktop now to ensure you’re ready for Firefox Home once it’s available for the iPhone.
Editor’s Note: On May 10, Mike Beltzner presented the vision for Firefox 4 (the next major release of Firefox) to the Mozilla community. For more details, check out Mike Beltzner’s blog post, reposted below.
Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering
Today, I presented an early product plan for Firefox 4 to the Mozilla community (live, over the web!) to share our vision for the next version of Firefox, and what projects are underway to realize it. Then I invited everyone to get involved by joining our engineering or product development efforts.
The primary goals for Firefox 4 will be making a browser:
- Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast
- Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
- Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.
Usually software producers don’t present these sorts of plans in public until they’re finalized, but Mozilla is a little different. We work in the open, socializing our plans early and often to gather feedback and build excitement in our worldwide community. Not everyone could attend the presentation today, though, so I’m sharing the slides and video here as well.
That said: please understand that these plans are fluid and are likely to change. As with past releases, we use dates to set targets for milestones, and then we work together to track to those targets. We always judge each milestone release against our basic criteria of quality, performance, and usability, and we only ship when it’s ready.
If you have Firefox or a modern web browser that supports fully open HTML video, you can watch the presentation.
If you’d just like to thumb through the slides yourself, I’ve put them up on SlideShare:
As always we’re interested in your feedback. Use Rypple, or leave a comment here, or if you have specific thoughts about Firefox or our platform development you can join the discussion in:
Mozilla Planning Forum
