If you’re running Firefox on macOS you might have noticed that its responsiveness has improved significantly in version 103, especially if you’ve got a lot of tabs, or when your machine is busy running other applications at the same time. This improvement was achieved via a small change in how locking is implemented within Firefox’s memory allocator. Firefox uses a highly customized version of the

WebGPU is an emerging API that provides access to the graphics and computing capabilities of hardware on the web. It’s designed from the ground up within the W3C GPU for the Web group by all major browser vendors, as well as Intel and a few others, guided by the following principles: We are excited to bring WebGPU support to Firefox because it will allow richer and more complex graphics applicatio

Standardizing WASI: A system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web Today, we announce the start of a new standardization effort — WASI, the WebAssembly system interface. Why: Developers are starting to push WebAssembly beyond the browser, because it provides a fast, scalable, secure way to run the same code across all machines. But we don’t yet have a solid foundation to build upon. Code ou

Fast, Bump-Allocated Virtual DOMs with Rust and Wasm Dodrio is a virtual DOM library written in Rust and WebAssembly. It takes advantage of both Wasm’s linear memory and Rust’s low-level control by designing virtual DOM rendering around bump allocation. Preliminary benchmark results suggest it has best-in-class performance. Background Dodrio from a User’s Perspective Internal Design Preliminary Be

Thanks! Please check your inbox to confirm your subscription. If you haven’t previously confirmed a subscription to a Mozilla-related newsletter you may have to do so. Please check your inbox or your spam filter for an email from us. Olivier de B. In terms of compression, AV1 sounds good, but I get quite worried when, concerning encoding performance, I read: “..in our AV1 First Look, we encoded wi

WebAssembly.Studio is an online IDE (integrated development environment) that helps you learn and teach others about WebAssembly. It’s also a Swiss Army knife that comes in handy whenever working with WebAssembly. We started working on WebAssembly Studio in late December 2017, in an attempt to merge two existing tools that we had developed: WasmExplorer and WasmFiddle. Since then, thanks to severa

Baby’s First Rust+WebAssembly module: Say hi to JSConf EU! A secret project has been brewing for JSConf EU, and this weekend is the big reveal… The Arch is a larger-than-life experience that uses 30,000 colored LEDs to create a canvas for light animations. And you can take charge of this space. Using modules, you can create a light animation. But even though this is JSConf, these animations aren’t

Firefox 61: Developer Edition is available now, and contains a ton of great new features and under-the-hood improvements. A Darker Dark Theme Taking inspiration from Spinal Tap, Developer Edition’s dark theme now darkens more parts of the browser, including the new tab page. Searchable websites can now be added to Firefox via the “Add Search Engine” item inside the Page Action menu. The sites must

Over the last year and a bit, the MDN Web Docs team has been designing, building, and implementing interactive examples for our reference pages. The motivation for this was the idea that MDN should do more to help “action-oriented” users: people who like to learn by seeing and playing around with example code, rather than by reading about it. We’ve just finished adding interactive examples for the

One big 2018 goal for the Rust community is to become a web language. By targeting WebAssembly, Rust can run on the web just like JavaScript. But what does this mean? Does it mean that Rust is trying to replace JavaScript? The answer to that question is no. We don’t expect Rust WebAssembly apps to be written completely in Rust. In fact, we expect the bulk of application code will still be JS, even

If you know the ropes, good news! Firefox now has support for headless mode, making it easier to use as a backend to automated tools. You can jump ahead to learn how to use it. Browser automation is not a new idea, but is an increasingly important part of how modern websites are built, tested, and deployed. Automation setups range from scripts run on local machines to vast deployments of specializ

Comparing Browser Page Load Time: An Introduction to Methodology On blog.mozilla.org, we shared results of a speed comparison study to show how fast Firefox Quantum with Tracking Protection enabled is compared to other browsers. While the blog post there focuses on the results and the speed benefits that Tracking Protection can deliver to users even outside of Private Browsing, we also wanted to s

Asynchronous pan and zoom (APZ) is landing in Firefox Quantum, which means jank-free, smooth scrolling for all! We talked about APZ in this earlier article, but here’s a recap of how it works: Until now, scrolling was part of the main JavaScript thread. This meant that when JavaScript code was being executed, the user could not scroll the page. With APZ, scrolling is decoupled from the JavaScript

Thanks! Please check your inbox to confirm your subscription. If you haven’t previously confirmed a subscription to a Mozilla-related newsletter you may have to do so. Please check your inbox or your spam filter for an email from us. bornjre i developer edition about two weeks ago loved ui but after some time my laptop fan went nuts, i was running only two tabs (one being youtube) and nothing much

The most popular and powerful web development tool. Firebug has been a phenomenal success. Over its 12-year lifespan, the open source tool developed a near cult following among web developers. When it came out in 2005, Firebug was the first tool to let programmers inspect, edit, and debug code right in the Firefox browser. It also let you monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page, whi

This is the first post in a two-part series for getting started with CSS Grid Layout. If you are interesting in learning more about CSS Grid and the new CSS Grid Layout feature in Firefox, visit the Firefox DevTools Playground. CSS Grid Layout is completely changing the game for web design. It allows us to create complex layouts on the web using simple CSS. “But wait! I can already create layouts

This past summer, four time-crunched engineers with no prior WebAssembly experience began experimenting. The result after six weeks of exploration was WebSight: a real-time face detection demo based on OpenCV. By compiling OpenCV to WebAssembly, the team was able to reuse a well-tested C/C++ library directly in the browser and achieve performance an order of magnitude faster than a similar JavaScr

WebVR Support on Desktop Firefox on Windows is the first desktop browser to support the new WebVR standard (and macOS support is in Nightly!). As the originators of WebVR, Mozilla wanted it to embody the same principles of standardization, openness, and interoperability that are hallmarks of the Web, which is why WebVR works on any device: Vive, Rift, and beyond. To learn more, check out vr.mozill

WebAssembly, a new binary execution format for the Web, is starting to arrive in stable versions of browsers. A major goal of WebAssembly is to be fast. This post gives some technical details about how it achieves that. Of course, “fast” is relative. Compared to JavaScript and other dynamic languages, WebAssembly is fast because it is statically typed and simple to optimize. But WebAssembly is als

WebAssembly is fast. You’ve probably heard this. But what is it that makes WebAssembly fast? In this series, I want to explain to you why WebAssembly is fast. Wait, so what is WebAssembly? WebAssembly is a way of taking code written in programming languages other than JavaScript and running that code in the browser. So when people say that WebAssembly is fast, what they are comparing it to is Java