WebAssembly Articles
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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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WebAssembly and Back Again: Fine-Grained Sandboxing in Firefox 95
In Firefox 95, we're shipping a novel sandboxing technology called RLBox — developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas — that makes it easy and efficient to isolate subcomponents to make the browser more secure. This technology opens up new opportunities beyond what's been possible with traditional process-based sandboxing, and we look forward to expanding its usage and (hopefully) seeing it adopted in other browsers and software projects.
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Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
Last year, during lockdown, many discovered the importance of PDF forms when having to deal remotely with administrations and large organizations like banks. Firefox supported displaying PDF forms, but it didn’t support filling them: users had to print them, fill them by hand, and scan them back to digital form. We decided it was time to reinvest in the PDF viewer (PDF.js) and support filling PDF forms within Firefox to make our users' lives easier.
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A New Backend for Cranelift, Part 1: Instruction Selection
This post will describe my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I’ll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we’ve been working on.
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Firefox 79: The safe return of shared memory, new tooling, and platform updates
Firefox 79 offers a new Promise method, more secure
target=_blanklinks, logical assignment operators, tooling improvements for better JavaScript debugging, and many other updates of interest to web developers. In addition, shared memory is back at last, with a safer implementation. -
Safely reviving shared memory
At Mozilla, we want the web to be capable of running high-performance applications so that users and content authors can choose the safety, agency, and openness of the web platform. Shared-memory multi-threading is an essential low-level building block for high-performance applications. However, keeping users safe is paramount, which is why shared memory and high-resolution timers were effectively disabled at the start of 2018, in light of Spectre. Until now...
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Debugging WebAssembly Outside of the Browser
WebAssembly has begun to establish itself outside of the browser via dedicated runtimes like Mozilla’s Wasmtime and Fastly’s Lucet. While the promise of a new, universal format for programs is appealing, it also comes with new challenges. At Mozilla, we’ve been prototyping ways to enable source-level debugging of .wasm files using existing tools, like GDB and LLDB.
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The Arch: Using Rust & WebAssembly to animate 30k colored LED lights
In June, Mozilla collaborated with artist Ian Brill to create an installation called the “Arch” at JSConf EU in Berlin. This interactive environment allowed people to experience the intersection of art and technology in a physical, pulsating, immersive way. The environment also created an opportunity for JavaScripters and friends to create animations and experience the underlying capabilities of WebAssembly and Rust.
