Articles
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Improving Firefox responsiveness on macOS
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.
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The 100% Markdown Expedition
In June 2021, we decided to start converting the source code for MDN web docs from HTML into a format that would be easier for us to work with. The goal was to get 100% of our manually-written documentation converted to Markdown, and we really had a mountain of source code to climb for this particular expedition. In this post, we’ll describe why we decided to migrate to Markdown, and the steps you can take that will help us on our mission.
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Merging two GitHub repositories without losing commit history
How do you merge two Git repositories without losing history? This post will take you through the step-by-step process.
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Neural Machine Translation Engine for Firefox Translations add-on
Firefox Translations is a website translation add-on that provides an automated translation of web content. In this article, we will discuss the technical challenges around the development of the translation engine and how we solved them to build a usable Firefox Translations add-on.
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The JavaScript Specification has a New License
As part of our work to ensure a free and open web, we've been working together with Ecma International, and many partners to write a License inspired by the W3C Document and Software License. Our goal was that JavaScript’s status would align with other specifications of the Web. In addition, with this new license available to all TCs at Ecma International, this will provide other organizations to approach standardization with the same perspective.
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Fuzzing rust-minidump for Embarrassment and Crashes – Part 2
For the last year, we've been working on the development of rust-minidump, a pure-Rust replacement for the minidump-processing half of google-breakpad. The final part in this series takes you through fuzzing rust-minidump.
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Hacks Decoded: Bikes and Boomboxes with Samuel Aboagye
Samuel Aboagye is a genius. Aboagye is 17 years old. In those 17 years, he’s crafted more inventions than you have, probably. Among them: a solar-powered bike and a Bluetooth speaker, both using recycled materials. We caught up with Aboagye over video chat in hopes that he’d talk with us about his creations, and ultimately how he’s way cooler than any of us at 17.
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Everything Is Broken: Shipping rust-minidump at Mozilla – Part 1
For the last year, we've been working on the development of rust-minidump, a pure-Rust replacement for the minidump-processing half of google-breakpad. The first in this two-part series explains what minidumps are, and how we made rust-minidump.
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Training efficient neural network models for Firefox Translations
The Bergamot project is a collaboration between Mozilla, University of Edinburgh, Charles University in Prague, the University of Sheffield, and University of Tartu with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. It brings MT to the local environment, providing small, high-quality, CPU optimized NMT models. The Firefox Translations web extension utilizes proceedings of project Bergamot and brings local translations to Firefox. In this article, we will discuss the components used to train our efficient NMT models.
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Improved Process Isolation in Firefox 100
Firefox uses a multi-process model for additional security and stability while browsing: Web Content (such as HTML/CSS and Javascript) is rendered in separate processes that are isolated from the rest of the operating system and managed by a privileged parent process. This way, the amount of control gained by an attacker that exploits a bug in a content process is limited. In this article, we would like to dive a bit further into the latest major milestone we have reached: Win32k Lockdown, which greatly reduces the capabilities of the content process when running on Windows.
