31
What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
(“This Week in Glean'' is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release ...
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Visit blog.mozilla.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Apr 2012 – Sep 2026
Web & Frontend 172Security & Privacy 103Tech Industry & Business 70Software Engineering 66Society, Policy & Culture 47Systems & Performance 28
32
Please grow your buffers exponentially
If you record every heap allocation and re-allocation done by Firefox you find some interesting things. In particular, you find some sub-optimal buffer growth strategies that cause a lot of heap churn.
33
Firefox finally plugs the leak
Leaky add-ons are a big problem, but there’s been lots of action relating to them recently. What follows is a summary of the situation and a request for help from currently Nightly testers who use add-ons.
34
The Path to Parallel JavaScript
Between the coming release of ES6 and unrelenting competition for JIT performance, these are exciting times for JavaScript. But an area where JS still lags ...
35
How to speed up the Rust compiler some more in 2020
I last wrote in April about my work on speeding up the Rust compiler. Time for another update.
36
Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported
Update: this post was updated to reflect a change in how we determine when Firefox will run in multiprocess mode. Firefox won’t run in multiprocess mode unless add-ons are explicitly ...
37
Snips Uses Rust to Build an Embedded Voice Assistant
The team at Paris-based Snips has created a voice assistant that can be embedded in a single device or used in a home network to control lights, thermostat
38
On mutex performance and WTF::Lock
One of the things I’ve been doing this quarter is removing Gecko’s dependence on NSPR locks . Gecko’s (non-recursive) mutexes and condition variables now use platform-specific constructs, rather than indirecting through NSPR. This change makes things smaller, especially on POSIX platforms, and uses no dynamic memory…
39
Manifest v3 in Firefox: Recap and Next Steps
It’s been about a year since our last update regarding Manifest v3. A lot has changed since then, not least of which has been the formation of a community group ...
40
Generational GC has landed in Firefox
Big news: late last week, generational garbage collection landed. It was backed out at first due to some test failures, but then re-landed and appears to have stuck.
41
How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2018: NLL edition
Niko Matsakis recently blogged about the Rust compiler’s new borrow checker , which implements non-lexical lifetimes (NLL). The new borrow checker is a really nice improvement to Rust, because it accepts many sound programs that the old borrow checker rejected.
42
Firefox now only has one HTML parser
Strumenti e risorse per le nuove forme di comunicazione
43
Firefox Preview/GeckoView Add-Ons Support
Back in June, Mozilla announced Firefox Preview, an early version of the new browser for Android that is built on top of Firefox's own mobile browser engine, GeckoView. We've gotten ...
44
Evaluating Bazel for building Firefox
After the Whistler All-Hands this past summer, I started seriously looking at whether Firefox should switch to using Bazel for its build system.
45
Manifest v3 Update
Manifest v3 support for Firefox extensions is coming in late 2021. See a high-level summary of changes to the platform.
46
How to speed up the Rust compiler
Rust is a great language, and Mozilla plans to use it extensively in Firefox. However, the Rust compiler (rustc) is quite slow and compile times are a pain point for many Rust users. Recently I’ve been working on improving that. This post covers how I’ve done this, and should be of interest to anybody else who wants…
47
How to speed up the Rust compiler some more in 2018
I recently wrote about some work I’ve done to speed up the Rust compiler . Since then I’ve done some more.
48
The Emterpreter: Run asm.js code before it can be parsed
I'm excited to announce a new Mozilla Research experiment: the Emterpreter, a pure-JavaScript interpreter that can start running large Emscripten-compiled apps faster than JavaScript engines can, giving developers control over ...
49
Firefox 15 plugs the add-on leaks
Firefox 15 prevents most memory leaks caused by add-ons, including Firebug. For many users with add-ons installed this will significantly reduce Firefox’s memory consumption, without requiring upgrades to those add-ons.
50
Sane Concurrency with Go
Glyph Lefkowitz wrote an enlightening post recently in which he expounds in some detail about the challenges of writing highly concurrent software. If you write software ...
51
How to speed up the Rust compiler some more
I recently wrote about some work I’ve done to speed up the Rust compiler . Since then I’ve done some more.
52
WebExtensions in Firefox 52
Firefox 52 landed in Developer Edition this week, so we have another update on WebExtensions for you. WebExtensions are becoming the standard for add-on development in Firefox. API Parity The ...
53
An even slimmer pdf.js
TL;DR: Firefox’s built-in PDF viewer is on track to benefit from additional large reductions in memory consumption when Firefox 33 is released in mid-October.
54
Verified cryptography for Firefox 57
Traditionally, software is produced in this way: write some code, maybe do some code review, run unit-tests, and then hope it is correct. Hard experience shows that it is very ...
55
Firefox, Heal Thyself
This week's release of Firefox includes the beginning of a pretty cool feature. The Firefox Health Report is a new system we've built to log basic health information about your ...
56
Promoted Add-ons Pilot
Today, we are launching a pilot program to give developers a way to promote their add-ons on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). This pilot program, which will run between the end of September ...
57
WebExtensions in Firefox 45
In August we announced that work had begun on the WebExtensions API as the future of developing add-ons in Firefox. This post covers the progress we’ve made since then. WebExtensions ...
58
I rewrote Firefox's BMP decoder
Recently I’ve been deliberately working on some areas of Firefox I’m unfamiliar with, particular relating to graphics. This led me to rewriting Firefox’s BMP decoder and learn a number of interesting things along the way.
59
JavaScript – The monkeys in 2013
A monkey. That’s the default name a part in the JavaScript Engine of Mozilla Firefox gets. Even the full engine has its own monkey name, ...
60
A big step towards Firefox generational and compacting GC
People frequently ask me for status updates on generational GC, and I usually say I’ll tell them when something notable happens. Well, something notable just happened: exact rooting landed .