Wherever you live, it’s a season of work holidays, school vacations, year-end blog posts, and lists. The Hacks blog will be back in early January 2015 to continue writing for developers about the products and technologies created by Mozilla and by builders of the Open Web around the world.

In the (chronological) list below, we celebrate some 2014 milestones and memorable moments for Mozilla, Firefox, and the web platform:

• The new improved Firefox Sync launched early in 2014, built atop Firefox Accounts. Here’s a deeper look at the new Sync protocol.
• Mozilla worked with the Apache Cordova team to integrate Firefox OS with Cordova’s open source device APIs, enabling mobile app developers to access native device functions from JavaScript, and release Cordova apps for the Firefox OS platform. Cordova is the underlying software in Adobe PhoneGap: the integration made it possible for PhoneGap developers to easily port their apps to the Firefox Marketplace.
• Mozilla Research made great progress on Servo, a prototype browser engine. Servo is written in Rust, a systems programming language designed to support concurrency and parallelism for modern hardware. Another Big Milestone for Servo—Acid2 was reported in the spring.
• Australis was the codename for our major redesign of the Firefox Desktop browser, which launched in late April. Designer Stephen Horlander wrote a post about the process, titled (Re)Designing Firefox.
• The summer release of Firefox 31 brought new capabilities for game developers, including access to emscripten for compiling to JavaScript. In Resources for HTML5 game developers, we described some of the tools and techniques for coding and debugging sophisticated, performant HTML5 games. On the Mozilla blog, we featured the first commercial games to leverage asm.js, demonstrating the readiness of HTML5 as a game platform.
• In October, we shared a Preview of Firefox Hello, a WebRTC-powered voice/video chat service.
• As part of the festivities surrounding Firefox’s 10th birthday, Mozilla Research launched MozVR to help bring virtual reality to the Web. Grab your oculi and hold on to your hats.
• At the same time, the Firefox Developer Tools team released Firefox Developer Edition, the first browser created specifically for developers. Though still in its early days, the Developer Edition features Valence, an integrated add-on to let you develop and debug your app across multiple browsers and devices, as well as WebIDE, providing an editing environment for app development and remote debugging.
• The evolution of asm.js continued with the release of Massive, an open source benchmarking tool that measures asm.js performance specifically. You can run Massive here.
• Mozilla and partners announced the formation of the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and launched the Let’s Encrypt initiative. Let’s Encrypt is a new Certificate Authority that’s free, automated, and open. It’s due to arrive in summer 2015.
• Our friends at Telenor introduced Gonzo, an ongoing project which explores the use of Firefox OS as an embedded platform. Telenor engineer and Firefox OS evangelist Jan Jongboom is hacking together a wireless camera and sharing what he learns along the way.
• Firefox OS Expands to Nearly 30 Countries – It’s been an expansive year. At last count, Firefox OS is now up and running on 16 smartphones offered in 29 countries. And in December news, Mozilla and KDDI announced the release of Japan’s first Firefox OS smartphone, which went on sale on December 25. The Fx0 is the first high-spec Firefox OS smartphone and it’s a beauty!

If you’re interested in writing for the Hacks blog in 2015, we’d love to hear from you. Email us. In the meantime, have a safe and hacky holiday!