Mozilla News Archives

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.

The latest Firefox Nightly builds have the experimental WebGPU support working in early form. WebGPU is the W3C-backed web standard for modern graphics and compute that is based upon concepts from the likes of Vulkan and Direct3D 12.

Mozilla has released Firefox 75.0 as what is a big update for Linux users.

With the upcoming Firefox 75 there is VA-API GPU-based video acceleration working on Wayland. While this built off FFmpeg, the initial code was limited to supporting H.264 while for Firefox 76 that is being extended.

With the release of Firefox 74.0 yesterday and that also pushing Firefox 75.0 to beta, here are some fresh benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux of Firefox 73 vs. 74 vs. 75 Beta, both out-of-the-box and when force enabling WebRender.

While we are very excited for Firefox 75 with Wayland and video acceleration improvements along with maturing Flatpak support, out today is Firefox 74.0 as the newest version of Mozilla's web browser.

Mozilla engineers have been making good progress on being able to ship a Flatpak'ed Firefox web browser for better security/sandboxing and easier distribution on Linux systems.

Firefox 75 due to be released next month should finally have its native Wayland support in good order.

Mozilla Firefox 73 is available this morning as the latest update to this open-source cross-platform web browser.

Mozilla developer Dzmitry Malyshau has provided an update on WGPU, their implementation of WebGPU built off GFX-RS and Rust for next-gen graphics and compute on the web.

Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client has been rather neglected the past several years with all the focus on the Firefox web browser, but as the next step forward for this mail/RSS client is now placing it under the newly-formed MZLA Technologies Corporation.

Some exciting news this week for Firefox users running on Wayland...

Firefox 72 is now available from Mozilla's FTP server as their first release of 2020 and ahead of their more aggressive release cycle moving forward.

One of the side projects Mozilla continues to develop is DeepSpeech, a speech-to-text engine derived from research by Baidu and built atop TensorFlow with both CPU and NVIDIA CUDA acceleration. This week marked the release of Mozilla DeepSpeech 0.6 with performance optimizations, Windows builds, lightening up the language models, and other changes.

With each new release of Firefox we set out to see how the performance is looking on the Linux desktop. One discovery we've made is that when using Intel's Clear Linux the Firefox performance is a lot more competitive to Google Chrome than we traditionally see on Ubuntu Linux. But with Firefox 71 we're seeing the performance trending lower compared to Firefox 69 and 70.

Today marks the last Mozilla Firefox feature update of 2019 with the release of Firefox 71.0.

Mozilla, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat have announced the Bytecode Alliance as a new initiative built around WebAssembly and focused on providing a secure-by-default bytecode that can run from web browsers to desktops to IoT/embedded platforms.

Following last week's release of Firefox 70 and Chrome 78 I posted some fresh Linux web browser benchmarks where the Mozilla browser continued to get beat severely by Google on Linux. But is the situation any better with Firefox 71 in beta? Not really.

Firefox 70.0 officially hit the web this morning as the newest version of Mozilla's web browser.

Mozilla announced today they are tightening up the Firefox release cycle even more... Expect to see new Firefox releases monthly.

One of the best and most practical use-cases for sandboxed Linux apps via Flatpak or Snaps is certainly web browsers. There has been unofficial Firefox Flatpaks offered to this point but it's looking like better support for a Flatpak'ed Firefox could be coming down the pipe soon.

Firefox 69.0 is set to be officially released tomorrow but for those eager to upgrade the release binaries have now hit their FTP server.

It's been over one year since the introduction of the Mozilla Thunderbird 60.0 series while today Thunderbird 68.0 was made as the next official update.

Mozilla rolled out Firefox 68.0 as the newest version of their web-browser.

Mozilla developers working on the Servo browser engine code have begun implementing hardware-accelerated video playback for Linux.

In addition to Firefox 68's WebRender slated to deliver much better performance, another headlining feature of this next Mozilla Firefox web-browser update is BigInt support.

Mozilla set sail Firefox 67.0 this morning as the newest version of this web browser and the update is heavy on the feature front.

Developers at Mozilla, Facebook, Cloudflare, and elsewhere have been drafting "BinaryAST" as a new over-the-wire format for JavaScript.

After a long weekend, Mozilla has released Firefox 66.0.4 to address the glaring omission on Friday that led to most browser add-ons getting disabled due to an expired certificate used for signing these plug-ins.

If you are waking up this morning to find all of your Mozilla Firefox add-ons have expired, you are certainly not alone. A major blunder has found users of Firefox finding most add-ons getting disabled.

Mozilla WebThings is what was formerly known as "Project Things" while serving as an experiment around a platform for IoT devices on the web.

Mozilla presented at the NAB Streaming Summit last week over the state of the royalty-free AV1 video format aiming to compete with H.265/HEVC and succeeding VP9 for open-source use-cases.

While Linux users can today manually enable WebRender support for their Firefox installations, Mozilla is making the necessary adjustments to begin experimenting with enabling this Rust-written GPU-based rendering element for "qualified" Linux devices.

Mozilla this morning released Firefox 66.0 as the latest version of their open-source, cross-platform web browser.

Firefox 65.0 is out today as the latest stable release to Mozilla's open-source, cross-platform web browser.

As a longtime Thunderbird user going back to its original release, the details Mozilla revealed today about their development focus on their mail client for 2019 have me excited and adding to what I am looking forward to in 2019.

Firefox 64.0 is available today as the last major feature update to Mozilla's web browser for 2018.

After what feels like an eternity in waiting years for Mozilla to ship their Firefox web-browser with native Wayland support enabled, their latest Firefox Nightly builds have achieved this milestone.

After Microsoft added support for the WebP image format to their Edge browser last month, Mozilla is finally preparing to ship the Firefox browser with support for WebP. If all goes well, Firefox 65 will support WebP!

WebRender, the very exciting multi-year project for providing more GPU-accelerated rendering of web content and originally developed as part of the experimental Servo engine, has reached the beta milestone.

Ahead of the expected official release announcement tomorrow, Firefox 63.0 is now available from the Mozilla servers.

One of the Mozilla technologies we have been most excited about in recent years is WebRender, the Rust-written restructuring of the graphics/GPU code.

Firefox nightly builds are now built with the LLVM Clang compiler on all major platforms and the Linux build in particular is also now utilizing PGO optimizations too. Faster Firefox is coming thanks to this compiler work.

With Firefox 62.0 having shipped, Mozilla promoted Firefox 63.0 to beta as part of their usual release cadence.

While Mozilla isn't expected to officially announce Firefox 62.0 until tomorrow, as usual the binaries are available for wanting this web browser update right now.

With some out-of-tree code of Firefox Nightly with a modified version of Gecko using GFX-RS, it's possible to use the web-browser powered by the Vulkan API on Linux.

You should likely be familiar with WebAssembly as the binary format for executing code within web pages that can be nearly as fast as running native machine code -- and certainly much faster than JavaScript. A new research project has been exploring running WebAssembly in the CPU's Ring 0 -- yes, the highest privileged state of the processor -- in the name of better performance.

For those of you that have been waiting for a big update to the Thunderbird mail/RSS client, Thunderbird 60.0 is now available with plenty of changes.

After being on hiatus since the end of April, Mozilla's Servo Blog has finally put out a status update concerning their web engine improvements made over the past three months.

Following yesterday's release of Firefox 61, Mozilla pumped Firefox 62 into the beta channel.