Firefox’s crash reporter is hopefully not something that most users experience often. However, it is still a very important component of Firefox, as it is integral in providing insight into the most visible bugs: those which crash the main process. These bugs offer the worst user experience (since the entire application must close), so fixing them is a very high priority. Other types of crashes, such as content (tab) crashes, can be handled by the browser and reported gracefully, sometimes without the user being aware that an issue occurred at all. But when the main browser process comes to a ..read more

As an industry, generative AI is moving quickly, and so requires teams exploring new ideas and technologies to move quickly as well. To do so, we have been using Gradio, a low-code prototyping toolkit from Hugging Face, to spin up experiments and experiences. Gradio has allowed us to validate concepts through prototyping without large investments of time, effort, or infrastructure. Although Gradio has made the development phase of prototyping easier, the design phase has been largely the same. Even with Gradio, designers have had to create components in Figma, outline expected user flows and b ..read more

In collaboration with the other major browser engine developers, Mozilla is thrilled to announce Speedometer 3 today. Like previous versions of Speedometer, this benchmark measures what we think matters most for performance online: responsiveness. But today’s release is more open and more challenging than before, and is the best tool for driving browser performance improvements that we’ve ever seen. This fulfills the vision set out in December 2022 to bring experts across the industry together in order to rethink how we measure browser performance, guided by a shared goal to reflect the real-w ..read more

Firefox development uncovers many cross-platform differences and unique features of its combination of dependencies. Engineers working on Firefox regularly overcome these challenges and while we can’t detail all of them, we think you’ll enjoy hearing about some so here’s a sample of a recent technical investigation. During the Firefox 120 beta cycle, a new crash signature appeared on our radars with significant volume. At that time, the distribution across operating systems revealed that more than 50% of the crash volume originates from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS users. The main process crashes in a Can ..read more

A special thanks to Justine Tunney of the Mozilla Internet Ecosystem (MIECO), who co-authored this blog post. Today we’re announcing the first release of llamafile and inviting the open source community to participate in this new project. llamafile lets you turn large language model (LLM) weights into executables. Say you have a set of LLM weights in the form of a 4GB file (in the commonly-used GGUF format). With llamafile you can transform that 4GB file into a binary that runs on six OSes without needing to be installed. This makes it dramatically easier to distribute and run LLMs. It also me ..read more

The Mozilla AI Guide has launched and we welcome you to read through and get acquainted with it. You can access it here Our vision is for the AI Guide to be the starting point for every new developer to the space and a place to revisit for clarity and inspiration, ensuring that AI innovations enrich everyday life. The AI Guide’s initial focus begins with language models and the aim is to become a collaborative community-driven resource covering other types of models. To start the first few sections in the Mozilla AI Guide go in-depth on the most asked questions about Large Language Models (LLM ..read more

One of the biggest challenges for any software is to determine how changes impact user experience in the real world. Whether it’s the processing speed of video editing software or the smoothness of a browsing experience, there’s only so much you can tell from testing in a controlled lab environment. While local experiments can provide plenty of metrics, improvements to those metrics may not translate to a better user experience. This can be especially challenging with complex client software running third-party code like Firefox, and it’s a big reason why we’ve undertaken the Speedometer 3 eff ..read more

Protecting user privacy is a core element of Mozilla’s vision for the web and the internet at large. In pursuit of this vision, we’re pleased to announce new partnerships with Fastly and Divvi Up to deploy privacy-preserving technology in Firefox. Mozilla builds a number of tools that help people defend their privacy online, but the need for these tools reflects a world where companies view invasive data collection as necessary for building good products and making money. A zero-sum game between privacy and business interests is not a healthy state of affairs. Therefore, we dedicate considerab ..read more

Speedometer 3 is a cross-industry effort to build a modern browser benchmark rooted in real-world user experiences. Its goal is to focus browser engineering effort towards making the Web more smooth for actual users on actual pages. This is hard to do and most browser benchmarks don’t do it well, but we see it as a unique opportunity to improve responsiveness broadly across the Web. This requires a deliberate analysis of the ecosystem — starting with real user experiences and identifying the essential technical elements underlying them. We built several new tests from scratch, and also updated ..read more

I work on the Firefox sync team at Mozilla. Four years ago, we wrote a blog post describing our strategy to ship cross-platform Rust components for syncing and storage on all our platforms. The vision was to consolidate the separate implementations of features like history, logins, and syncing that existed on Firefox Desktop, Android, and iOS. We would replace those implementations with a core written in Rust and a set of hand-written foreign language wrappers for each platform: JavaScript for Desktop, Kotlin for Android, and Swift for iOS. Since then, we’ve learned some lessons and had to mo ..read more