Firefox Development Highlights Articles
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How we built Picture-in-Picture in Firefox Desktop with more control over video
A behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of the Picture-in-Picture player for the Firefox Desktop browser. This feature is now available for MacOS, Linux and Windows users. From the beginning, it's been shaped by your feedback and inputs, with user agency as a core principle of our design and development.
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Moving Firefox to a faster 4-week release cycle
Building and releasing a browser is complicated and involves many players. To optimize the process, and make it more reliable for all users, over the years we’ve developed a phased release strategy that includes ‘pre-release’ channels: Firefox Nightly, Beta, and Developer Edition. Starting Q1 2020, we're making a change. We plan to start shipping a major Firefox release every 4 weeks!
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The Baseline Interpreter: a faster JS interpreter in Firefox 70
Modern web applications load and execute a lot more JavaScript code than they did just a few years ago. While JIT (just-in-time) compilers have been very successful in making JavaScript performant, we needed a better solution. We’ve added a new, generated JavaScript bytecode interpreter to the JavaScript engine in Firefox 70. Instead of writing a new interpreter from scratch, we found a way to do this by sharing most code with our existing Baseline JIT. Meet the new Baseline Interpreter.
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Testing Picture-in-Picture for videos in Firefox 69 Beta and Developer Edition
Firefox has an experimental new UI feature in Firefox 69 Beta and Developer Edition - and Firefox engineers are looking for feedback on the implementation. Picture in Picture in the browser lets you pop a video out from where it’s being played into a special kind of window that’s always on top. Then you can move that window around or resize it however you need! Let us know what you think.
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Firefox 68: BigInts, Contrast Checks, and the QuantumBar
Firefox 68 is available today, sporting support for big integers, whole-page contrast checks checks for accessibility, and a completely new implementation of a core Firefox feature: the ever-awesome URL bar. Dan Callahan also reports on updated CSS scroll-snapping and other features, DOM API updates, next steps in the WebRender implementation, and more.
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Teaching machines to triage Firefox bugs
To help get bugs in front of the right Firefox engineers quickly, we developed BugBug, a machine learning tool that automatically assigns a product and component for each new untriaged bug. By presenting new bugs to triage owners faster, we hope to decrease the turnaround time to fix new issues. Check out BugBug for your own issue-tracking triage.
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Crossing the Rust FFI frontier with Protocol Buffers
The Firefox Application Services engineering team made the decision to use Rust to build cross-platform components for Firefox Sync, powering Firefox Accounts across many devices. They are implementing core business logic using Rust and wrapping it in a thin platform-native layer, such as Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS.
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Implications of Rewriting a Browser Component in Rust
There have been 69 security bugs in Firefox’s style component since the browser was first released in 2002. If we'd had a time machine and could have written this component in Rust from the start, 51 (73.9%) of these bugs would not have been possible. Rust isn't foolproof, but by removing the burden of memory safety, Rust lets programmers focus on logical correctness and soundness.
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New in Firefox DevTools 65
We just released Firefox 65 with a number of new developer features that make it even easier for you to create, inspect and debug the web. Among all the features and bug fixes that made it to DevTools in this new release, we particularly want to highlight our brand new Flexbox Inspector and all the features and enhancements that deliver smarter JavaScript inspection and debugging.
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Firefox 62 – Tools Cool for School!
From the new Firefox Shape Path Editor, which lets floated content sculpt the flow of content, to the Variable Fonts, which enable fine-grained adjustment of font rendering, to more efficient Firefox Dev Tools view options, Firefox 62 delivers a cornucopia of features.