1
How Firefox Got Fast Again
Over the past seven months, we’ve been rapidly replacing major parts of the engine, introducing Rust and parts of Servo to Firefox. Plus, we’ve had a browser performance strike force ...
Mozilla Hacks
Mozilla Hacks is written for web developers, designers and everyone who builds for the Web. Hacks is produced by Mozilla's Developer Relations team and features hundreds of posts from Mozilla ...
- Popular posts
- 219
- Total points
- 65,445
- HN comments
- 22,971
- Rank
- #9 company
Visit hacks.mozilla.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2010 – May 2026
Web & Frontend 170Software Engineering 69Tools & Productivity 44Systems & Performance 35Tech Industry & Business 31Security & Privacy 19
2
Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler
People call WebAssembly a game changer because it makes it possible to run code on the web faster. Some speedups are already present, and some are yet to come. With ...
3
The web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank
The Firefox Quantum release is getting close. It brings many performance improvements, including the super fast CSS engine that we brought over from Servo. But there’s another big piece of ...
4
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.
5
Shipping Rust code in Firefox
TL;DR: Starting with Firefox 48, Mozilla is shipping its first production Rust code, with more to come! Mozilla ❤ Rust It's hard to believe it's been almost seven years since ...
6
Inside a fast CSS engine
Project Quantum is a major rewrite of Firefox’s internals to make Firefox fast. We’re swapping in parts from our experimental browser, Servo, and making massive improvements to other parts of ...
7
Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon
The release of Apple Silicon based Macs at the end of last year generated a flurry of news and some surprises at the machine’s performance.
8
Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
We’ve been working hard on making Firefox even faster and we’re extremely happy to report that this has resulted in an improvement in speed.
9
Improving Firefox stability on Linux
A year ago at Mozilla we started to improve Firefox stability on Linux. This effort quickly became an example of good synergies between FOSS.
10
Improving Firefox stability on Windows by retrying failed memory allocation
Poorly behaving web pages and apps are no longer capable of crashing the browser by exhausting memory, thanks to a simple trick.
11
Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]
If you’re a regular reader of Hacks, you probably know about Rust, the ground-breaking, community-driven systems programming language sponsored by Mozilla. I covered Rust on Hacks back in July, to ...
12
Eliminating Data Races in Firefox
We successfully deployed ThreadSanitizer in the Firefox project to eliminate data races in our remaining C/C++ components.
13
Standardizing WASI: A system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web
WebAssembly is an assembly language for a conceptual machine, not a physical one. This is why it can be run across a variety of different machine architectures. WebAssembly needs a ...
14
The Bytecode Alliance: Building a secure, composable future for WebAssembly
Lin Clark introduces the Bytecode Alliance, and uses Code Cartoon illustrations to share their vision of a WebAssembly ecosystem that is secure by default, fixing cracks in today’s software foundations. ...
15
Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
Firefox will monitor available system memory and, should it become that a crash is imminent, Firefox will respond by unloading memory-heavy.
16
Everything Is Broken: Shipping Rust-Minidump at Mozilla
We've been working on the development of rust-minidump. The first in this two-part series explains what minidumps are and how we made rust-minidump.
17
Improved Process Isolation in Firefox 100
Firefox uses a multi-process model for additional security and stability while browsing. Web Content is rendered in separate processes.
18
Firefox brings smooth video playback with the fastest AV1 decoder
With this week's release of Firefox 67, the new high performance royalty-free AV1 video decoder dav1d is now enabled by default on all desktop platforms (Windows, OSX and Linux) for ...
19
How fast is PDF.js?
Hi, my name is Thorben and I work at Opera Software in Oslo, not at Mozilla. So, how did I end up writing for Mozilla Hacks? Maybe you know that ...
20
Building A Node.js Server That Won't Melt
This is episode 5, out of a total 12, in the A Node.JS Holiday Season series from Mozilla's Identity team. For this post, we bring the discussion back to scaling ...
21
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. ...
22
A New Back End for Cranelift
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.
23
Asm.js performance improvements in the latest version of Firefox
The latest version of Firefox which launched last week includes a major update to the user interface as well as to features like Sync. Another area in which this release ...
24
A New RegExp Engine in SpiderMonkey
Regular expressions – commonly known as RegExps – are a powerful and heavily used tool for manipulating strings in JavaScript. This post describes how we updated the RegExp engine in ...
25
The Constrained Directional Enhancement Filter in AV1
AV1 is a new general-purpose video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. The alliance began development of the new codec using Google’s VPX codecs, Cisco’s Thor codec, and ...
26
Building the DOM faster: speculative parsing, async, defer and preload
In 2017, the toolbox for making sure your web page loads fast includes everything from minification and asset optimization to caching, CDNs, code splitting and tree shaking. Understanding what goes ...
27
Building the Firefox browser for Firefox OS
As soon as the Boot to Gecko (B2G) project was announced in July 2011 I knew it something I wanted to contribute to. I'd already been working on the idea ...
28
Quantum Up Close: What is a browser engine?
A web browser is a piece of software that loads remote files and displays them locally, allowing for user interaction. Quantum is the code name for an project we’ve undertaken ...
29
Asm.js Speedups Everywhere
asm.js is an easy-to-optimize subset of JavaScript. It runs in all browsers without plugins, and is a good target for porting C/C++ codebases such as game engines - which have ...
30
A crash course in just-in-time compilers (2017)
This is the second part in a series on WebAssembly and what makes it fast. If you haven’t read the others, we recommend starting from the beginning. JavaScript started out ...