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.

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.