Mozilla News Archives

Thanks to Mozilla's Telemetry capabilities, there is some interesting insight to how many Linux desktop users are still relying on an X.Org (X11) Server without Wayland.

A few years ago Mozilla started Firefox Reality as a browser focused on AR/VR mixed reality. Like Mozilla's other failed projects, Firefox Reality is being tossed into the scrap bin next to the likes of Firefox OS and Firefox Send. But thanks to the nature of open-source, the work is being continued on independently by Igalia with the new Wolvic project.

In recent days Mozilla has begun activating Wayland support by default on Firefox Nightly for configurations capable of running Wayland.

Thanks to Red Hat developer Martin Stránský, he has managed to get the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) working for AV1 content within the Firefox web browser.

Firefox 96.0 is officially shipping today as the first update of 2022 for this open-source web browser.

Mozilla Firefox 95.0 is now available for download ahead of its official release tomorrow. Making this new version interesting is the RLBox integration.

Firefox 94.0 is now available and for a change it's quite exciting on the Linux front.

Mozilla Firefox 94 will begin using its EGL back-end on the Linux desktop in conjunction with supported graphics drivers in order to provide better performance, lower power usage, and other benefits.

While the formal announcement has yet to hit the wire, releasing today is Firefox 93.0 as the newest monthly feature update to Mozilla's web browser.

With this week's release of Firefox 91, like clockwork the beta for Firefox 92 is now available to facilitate wider testing of this next browser release to debut in September.

Thunderbird 91 is now available as the first major update in a year for this Mozilla mail client that is succeeding the Thunderbird 78 series.

Firefox 91.0 is out this morning as the latest monthly update to Mozilla's cross-platform web browser.

Thunderbird 91.0 is approaching release as an annual feature release to this open-source, cross-platform mail client and RSS reader. Given the current release is Thunderbird 78 from last July, there is a lot in store for this "2021" update.

Mozilla is trying once again to enable AVIF image decoding support by default within the Firefox web browser. AVIF is the promising image file format based on using AV1 in the HEIF file format.

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 90.0 as the latest monthly update to their cross-platform web browser.

Mozilla is kicking off June by shipping Firefox 89.0 with their latest revisions to their user interface.

Mozilla detailed today how their year-long effort so far aiming to improve the stability of the Firefox web browser on Linux is paying off.

With Firefox 88 released yesterday, the Firefox 89 beta is now available for testing. Notable this time around is refining of the web browser's user interface.

Firefox 88.0 is out today as the latest version of Mozilla's web browser.

QUIC and HTTP/3 support is now appearing in Firefox Nightly and Beta build while it will begin its roll-out with the upcoming Firefox 88 stable release.

Mozilla Firefox 87.0 is out today as the newest release of this open-source, cross-platform web browser.

Firefox 86.0 is out today as the latest monthly update to this open-source web browser that continues to work on ramping up its security offerings.

Mozilla Firefox 85.0 is available today as the open-source web browser's first major release of the year.

Last year during the big round of layoffs at Mozilla the entire Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) writers team was laid off. That was a particularly sad blow considering how valuable the MDN documentation has been to web developers as a very useful resource. Today the Mozilla folks are announced Open Web Docs in seemingly looking to have the community take over.

As noted before the holidays that Mozilla Firefox was ready to enable AVIF image decoding by default, now that the holidays have passed and developers back to their keyboards, Firefox today has re-enabled AVIF by default.

It looks like Mozilla Firefox very soon will be enabling support for AVIF as the image format based on AV1 video coding.

For those making use of the Firefox web browser, Mozilla has an early Christmas present with today's release of Firefox 84. Most significant with Firefox 84 is for Linux users that WebRender is finally getting flipped on by default for select system configurations.

With Firefox 83 released, like clock-work Mozilla has released the beta of Firefox 84.

Ever since the mass layoffs at Mozilla earlier this year and some Mozilla projects in jeopardy many have been wondering: what about Servo? Well, today it's heading off to the Linux Foundation.

Firefox 83.0 is now shipping as a notable update to the Mozilla web browser and this time around are some exciting changes.

Back in September Firefox Nightly enabled the JavaScript "Warp" code for SpiderMonkey and now for next week's Firefox 83.0 release it is remaining on by default for this web browser update.

Following this summer's big round of layoffs at Mozilla, the organization's deep learning open-source speech-to-text engine has been among the projects considered at risk. Fortunately, at least for now, DeepSpeech is still moving forward and is up to version 0.9.

Firefox 82.0 is now available as the latest release of Mozilla's web browser that continues on their expedited release cycles.

Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine team have been working on a big update to their just-in-time compiler code. This big update called "Warp" is now enabled in the latest Firefox Nightly builds for offering big speed-ups.

Firefox 81 is out this morning as the newest monthly update to the Mozilla web browser.

Following the recent layoffs at Mozilla and some projects seemingly at risk moving forward, one that we have been worried about is GFX-RS as the interesting Rust-based library implementing the Vulkan Portability Initiative using GFX-HAL.

Firefox 80.0 is now available. There isn't too much to get excited about with Firefox 80, but at least some changes on the developer front.

For a while now a Mozilla software project that's been an "unsung hero" has been DeepSpeech as their speech-to-text engine. Sadly, following the recent major layoffs at Mozilla and restructuring along with a shift to focusing more on their profitable activities, DeepSpeech for now has an uncertain future.

Mozilla today announced they are laying off around 250 of their employees with Mozilla Corporation and closing up their Taipei, Taiwan operations.

Firefox 79.0 isn't scheduled to be formally announced until Tuesday but the release binaries have now hit Mozilla's FTP servers.

There is finally a new release of the Thunderbird mail/RSS client available as the annual update to this longtime Mozilla mail client. Thunderbird 78 is the new version out and serves as an Extended-Support Release with many improvements in tow.

While Mozilla has been gradually enabling WebRender out-of-the-box in more Windows configurations with succeeding Firefox releases, up to now there hasn't been much visible effort in getting WebRender enabled out-of-the-box for any Linux configurations. But fortunately that is finally changing.

While recent Firefox releases have seen VA-API video acceleration working when running natively under Wayland, the Firefox 80 release later this summer will bring VA-API support by default to those running on a conventional X.Org Server.

Firefox 78.0 is available this morning as the newest version of Mozilla's web browser. Firefox 78.0 is also significant in being the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) series.

Following a beta period since last year as the Firefox Private Network, Mozilla's virtual private network offering is now going official and under the Mozilla VPN branding.

Mozilla's more rapid release schedule continues and that means today is Firefox 77.0 day.

Given last week's release of Firefox 76 and promoting 77 to beta, here are some fresh benchmarks of the recent Mozilla Firefox releases on Ubuntu Linux.

Firefox 76.0 is out today as the newest feature release to Mozilla's web browser.

Exciting times in Mozilla land as in addition to the recent Wayland improvements along with Flatpak availability and WebGPU support coming together, the newest Firefox Nightly builds now have AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) support.

One of the lesser known Mozilla software efforts is DeepSpeech as a speech-to-text engine built atop TensorFlow with CPU and GPU (CUDA) acceleration. Friday marked a new release of this DeepSpeech software that is yielding great results for converting spoken audio streams to text.