Mozilla News Archives

It's not any shiny new web browser feature but Mozilla announced they are moving from .tar.bz2 packages for their Firefox Linux binaries over to using .tar.xz for a faster and lighter experience.

Mozilla Firefox 132.0 release builds are now available for Linux, macOS, and Windows for this newest monthly feature release to this open-source web browser.

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine project that was born at Mozilla and now continued by Linux Foundation Europe with other stakeholders like Igalia has been making steady progress in recent months. The project's September 2024 status report is now available that outlines recent improvements to this open-source browser layout engine.

Firefox 131 is out today with a few improvements worth mentioning for Mozilla's web browser.

The Servo open-source browser layout engine has supported making use of the Firefox Devtools code for the provided web developer tools such as the HTML web page inspector and browser console. But that support had fallen into disrepair. Fortunately, thanks to a useful Outreachy project, the code has been updated and now working nicely with the newer Devtools code.

Mozilla is interested in a Rust-written JPEG-XL image decoder for its memory safety characteristics compared to the existing C++ code they rely on for JPEG-XL image support in Firefox. While Google previously removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium, it may be Google that comes to the rescue and writes a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that can then be shipped by Firefox.

Firefox 130 web browser binaries were published today ahead of the official release announcement going out on Tuesday. Firefox 130 isn't too particularly exciting but there are a few changes worth mentioning.

The Mozilla Ocho group leads "innovation and experiments" at Mozilla. Following all of their work on Llamafile for easily distributing large language models as a single file that can be easily executed across different hardware/software, their newest effort is Whisperfile for easy audio-to-text translations.

Mozilla Firefox 129.0 is now available for download ahead of its formal release announcement on Tuesday. Making Firefox 129 notable is that for non-local sites it's now replacing HTTP with HTTPS by default. Firefox will now aim for HTTPS as the default protocol on non-local sites.

Thunderbird 128 "Nebula" is now available as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) of this open-source and cross-platform mail client.

Mozilla Firefox 128.0 is now available for download ahead of the official release announcement due out in the coming hours.

Llamafile has been one of the better new initiatives out of Mozilla in recent years. Llamafile makes it easy to conveniently distribute and run large language models as a single file while supporting both CPU and GPU execution and all-around making AI LLMs much more approachable for end-users. Out today is Llamafile 0.8.7 with more performance optimizations and new features.

Mozilla Firefox 127.0 binaries are available for download today ahead of tomorrow's official announcement. Firefox 127 brings a few nice changes for this month's feature update.

Mozilla has pushed out its release images of the Firefox 126 web browser ahead of its official debut on Tuesday.

One of the interesting innovations out of Mozilla Ocho as the browser company's innovation and experiments group is Llamafile, a easy way to distribute and run AI large language models (LLMs) from a single file. Out this evening is Llamafile 0.8.2 is the newest release with an updated Llama.cpp and most excitingly are some AVX2 performance optimizations.

Mozilla hopes you'll never have to see it, but they've been rewriting their crash reporting application for Firefox within the Rust programming language.

While the Firefox web browser has long worked on AArch64 Linux and Mozilla even offers Windows ARM64/AArch64 binaries, to date Mozilla hasn't released official ARM64/AArch64 binaries for Linux. That is finally beginning to change.

Ahead of tomorrow's official release announcement, the Firefox 125.0 release binaries have been uploaded to the Mozilla mirror this morning. Firefox 125.0 brings a number of new features and developer additions -- more so than we've seen recently from the monthly Firefox releases.

The Firefox 124.0 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement tomorrow.

Firefox 123.0 binaries are available today ahead of the official announcement tomorrow for this newest monthly web browser update.

Earlier this month at FOSDEM in Brussels was a presentation by developers Brendan Abolivier, Ikey Doherty, and Sean Burke on the Thunderbird mail client beginning to make use of the Rust programming language within its codebase.

Mitchell Baker announced today she is stepping down as CEO of Mozilla Corporation but will retain the position of Mozilla Corporation Executive Chairwoman.

Mozilla's latest non-browser foray and attempt at generating additional revenue is Mozilla Monitor Plus, what formerly was known as the free service Firefox Monitor for monitoring of exposed personal information such as email addresses as part of security breaches to various web services.

As part of the renewed efforts around the Servo open-source web engine and making it usable for embedded purposes, the Servo engine has been tacking on a number of new features in recent weeks.

Today marks the first Mozilla Firefox feature release of 2024 with quite a number of new features to showcase in the newly-published Firefox 122.

Ahead of tomorrow's official announcement, the Mozilla Firefox 121.0 release binaries have hit the mirrors and it's keeping to the most exciting Christmas gift for Linux desktop users: Wayland support enabled by default!

Firefox 121 is aiming to ship with Wayland support enabled by default rather than falling back to XWayland on modern Linux desktops. So far things are looking up for this indeed remaining the case for next month's Firefox 121 stable release.

Ahead of the official release announcement due out tomorrow, the Mozilla Firefox 120.0 release binaries are now available.

Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default!

"FIREFOX DEVELOPMENT IS MOVING FROM MERCURIAL TO GIT," began the email today from Mozilla announcing Firefox is finally shifting over to Git!

Following Google's plans for removing Theora codec format support from the Chrome/Chromium browser, Mozilla is also eyeing a similar move for retiring Theora from Firefox.

While Mozilla has always produced Firefox Nightly builds for Linux as traditional binaries, they have finally decided to offer up an APT repository of Firefox Nightly builds to make it easy to stay up-to-date with new Firefox Nightly releases on Debian and Ubuntu Linux based distributions.

The Servo open-source web browser engine continues progressing as a community project under the leadership of Linux Foundation Europe. Over the course of October more features were implemented and additional fixes merged.

Ahead of the official planned announcement for Tuesday, the Mozilla Firefox 119.0 release binaries have been published for this monthly feature update.

While some Linux distributions like Fedora and Arch are enabling the native Wayland back-end for Firefox by default, upstream Firefox continues to not enable this Wayland support as part of their default builds. But -- at long last -- that might finally change soon.

Ahead of the formal announcement on Tuesday, Mozilla today uploaded the Firefox 118.0 release binaries as the latest monthly update for this cross-platform web browser.

The Firefox 117 release binaries are now available for download ahead of Mozilla's official announcement going out on Tuesday.

Mozilla Firefox has merged Wayland fractional-scale-v1 protocol support for handling fractional scaling with the web browser on the Linux desktop.

Mozilla developers are celebrating that they are now faster than Google Chrome with the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, although that test has been superseded by the JetStream benchmark.

Ahead of the official announcement tomorrow, Mozilla Firefox 116 builds are available today for those wanting this latest open-source web browser.

As a devoted Thunderbird mail client user for the past nearly twenty years since its first release, I'm elated today by the release of Thunderbird 115.

Mozilla Firefox 115.0 official builds are now available for this notable update to this open-source web browser while also marking the new Extended Support Release (ESR) series.

Another exciting milestone has been reached on Mozilla's long journey of improving the native Wayland support for the Firefox web browser on Linux.

Following last week's release of Chrome 114, Mozilla developers today uploaded the release binaries for Firefox 114 ahead of tomorrow's official announcement.

Mozilla is officially releasing Firefox 113 today and as usual the release binaries are already available for this monthly web browser update.

With Firefox 112 now released, Mozilla has promoted Firefox 113 to beta.

Mozilla has published the Firefox 112.0 binaries today ahead of tomorrow's official unveiling.

Mozilla announced today they are investing $30 million USD to build Mozilla.ai as a new start-up focused on "building a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem."

Mozilla has pushed out Firefox 110 today as the latest major version of their open-source web browser.

Back in 2020 Mozilla moved Servo to the Linux Foundation for the Rust-written web engine after it laid off the Servo developers. Servo development is now community/volunteer-driven and a road-map was published yesterday outlining some of their hopes for this calendar year.