We are pleased to announce that the proposal for an Extended Support Release (ESR) of Firefox is now a plan of action. The ESR version of Firefox is for use by enterprises, public institutions, universities and other organizations that centrally manage their Firefox deployments. Releases of the ESR will occur once a year, providing these organizations with a version of Firefox that receives security updates but does not make changes to the Web or Firefox Add-ons platform. We have worked with many organizations to ensure that the ESR balances their need for the latest security updates with the desire to have a lighter application certification burden.

Online life is evolving faster than ever and it’s imperative that Mozilla delivers improvements to the Web and to Firefox more quickly to reflect this. Providing updates to Firefox more frequently allows us to secure users against emerging threats and provide the platform for innovation that today’s rich and compelling Web experiences demand. However, this created challenges for organizations that have to deliver lots of mission-critical applications through Firefox, so we worked closely with the Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group to develop the Mozilla Firefox ESR plan.

Mozilla is committed to providing the best Web experience for people everywhere, and our goal for the Firefox ESR is to make it simpler for companies, public institutions, organizations, and institutions that manage their desktops to deploy Firefox in those environments. Over the last few months we received great feedback on the initial proposal from the Mozilla community and strongly believe that the ESR meets that goal.

Implementation specifics will be posted within a week to the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup and the EWG mailing list. If you’re interested in the ESR or discussions around deploying Firefox in a managed environment, we’d encourage you to join the Mozilla Enterprise Working Group and participate in its discussions and monthly conference calls. To join this group, please see the Enterprise wiki page for additional information.

Mozilla is committed to providing the best Web experience for people everywhere, for whom the Web has become such an important part of their daily lives.  Providing updates to Firefox more frequently allows us to secure users against emerging threats and provide the platform for innovation that today’s rich and compelling Web experiences demand.

The Mozilla Community has focused our efforts on the needs of the individual user, and prioritized the product roadmap and features accordingly. However, as is the case with many technologies, loyal Firefox users and their IT departments have sought to bring Firefox into their places of work.

A key challenge for enterprises is that they need to certify their websites, apps and add-ons each time Firefox is updated. This can take weeks or months. Security is also paramount, enterprises need access to a version that includes all known security fixes.

We are exploring solutions that balance these needs, with active discussion in our community.  Open Source software is well-suited to these challenges, as interested parties can come together to build what is needed.

We look forward to continuing the dialog, and will post updates as they become available.

A new release of Firefox 4 Beta is now ready for you to download and test! This release boosts performance in some important ways: it adds the JägerMonkey just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compiler; adds more support for hardware-accelerated graphics, as well as hardware acceleration for Windows XP and Mac OS X; and enables 3D capabilities, without the need for plug-ins, with WebGL.

This means pages load faster, interactions with websites are snappier and the Web is just a lot more fun. For developers, this means you can build richer high-performance Web applications and explore the world of 3D graphics, inherent to the Web.

Also, the Add-ons APIs for Firefox 4 are now stable, so if you are an add-on developer, now is the time to update your Firefox 3.6-compatible Add-ons to support Firefox 4.

What’s New:

Boosting JavaScript Performance with JägerMonkey
JägerMonkey is an invisible but powerful addition to Firefox 4 Beta. The Firefox SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine now incorporates the new JägerMonkey JIT compiler, which, along with enhancements to the existing TraceMonkey JIT and SpiderMonkey’s interpreter, add up to speeds that really show off today’s rich Web apps. You’ll notice this in faster start-up time, improved page-load speed and the performance of Web apps and games.

Firefox 4 Beta is really fast. Here’s how the latest beta compares with Firefox 3.6 and previous versions of Firefox 4 Beta on various JavaScript benchmark test suites:

For more details, see Firefox Engineer David Mandelin’s blog post.

Boosting Graphics Performance
This update to Firefox 4 Beta incorporates hardware-accelerated graphics into the final rendering of a website — referred to as “compositing.” This enables websites to load and respond faster to rich and interactive content like Web games, apps or photos. On Windows (including Windows XP), hardware acceleration is done using DirectX technology; on Mac OS X, it’s done using OpenGL.

Not all graphics cards and/or video drivers support hardware acceleration. Read these blog posts from Firefox Developer Joe Drew for more details on the latest improvements in hardware acceleration and to check if your hardware supports this functionality.

Bringing 3D graphics to Firefox with WebGL
Firefox 4 Beta enables developers to render 3D graphics using WebGL. Web developers can now create spectacular games, vivid graphics and brand-new visual experiences for the Web, without requiring users to install plug-ins! This means that 3D graphics can be mashed-up with other Web technologies to provide amazing experiences that seamlessly integrate with the rest of your website. WebGL in Firefox 4 Beta requires an OpenGL-capable graphics card on Windows or Mac OS X. Additional support for other graphics cards on Windows (specifically Intel GPUs) and Linux will come in future beta releases.

Support for Exquisite Fonts with OpenType
Get ready for websites with layouts as elegant as you would find in a typeset book. With support for OpenType font features in Firefox 4 Beta, designers and developers can create sophisticated effects by controlling ligatures, kerning, alternative glyphs, small caps and more. To learn more, read this blog post from Firefox Platform Engineer John Daggett.

Improved HTML5 Forms
Firefox 4 Beta also improves HTML forms. Detailed HTML5 forms are a snap to create with auto-complete, HTML5 form validation and the new Form API. For more information, see this blog post from Firefox Developer Mounir Lamouri.

Features and Performance
Firefox 4 is shaping up to be the fast and fun browser to experience the Web the way you want it. This release is a great step and combines a lot of features that make your travels around the Web fun, smooth and personal (Firefox Sync, Panorama, App Tabs and the new Add-ons Manager, just to name a few) with excellent performance. It’s really great.

Thank you!
Thanks to everyone who has tested the beta so far. Please keep your feedback coming. By participating in our Test Pilot studies (more than a million of you already have!) and using the Firefox 4 Beta Feedback Button (hundreds of thousands of responses so far!), you’re helping us make Firefox better all the time. Tell your friends. Together, we all make Firefox great.

If you’re already testing Firefox 4 Beta, you will be automatically updated to the latest version. There will be additional betas as we approach the final release, so stay tuned for the next release in the coming weeks.

For more information:
·      Download Firefox 4 Beta
·      Learn more about the features
·      Submit your feedback
·      Short, to the point FAQ
·      Long, technical release notes

The open Web is a great platform for rich applications. It would be even better if it had additional capabilities to ease discovery, acquisition, installation and use of apps, while also enabling monetization for developers. We designed and built a prototype of a system for open Web apps: Apps built using HTML/CSS/JavaScript that work both on computers and mobile phones, have many of the characteristics that users find compelling about native apps and provide developers with open and flexible distribution options.

Today, we are releasing technical documentation of the proposed system and a developer preview prototype that allows you to install, manage and launch Web apps in any modern desktop or mobile browser (Firefox 3.6 and later, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 6, Safari 5, Opera 10 and WebKit mobile). This prototype provides a simple mechanism to support paid apps and authentication features to allow apps to log users in upon launch.

The design proposed here provides the following capabilities and enables a new category of what we call “Open Web Apps” — apps that are truly of the Web.

Open Web Apps:

• Are built using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
• Can be “installed” to a dashboard within your mobile or desktop Web browser, or to your native OS desktop or mobile home screen.
• Work in all modern Web browsers, while enabling each browser to compete on app presentation, organization and management user interfaces.
• Support paid apps by means of an authorization model that uses existing identity systems like OpenID.
• Support portable purchases: An app purchased for one browser works in other browsers, and across multiple desktop and mobile platforms without repurchase.
• Can request access to one or more advanced and/or privacy-sensitive capabilities that they would like access to (like geolocation) which the system will mediate, giving the user the ability to opt-in to them if desired.
• Can be distributed by developers directly to users without any gatekeeper, and distributed through multiple stores, allowing stores to compete on customer service, price, policies, app discoverability, ratings, reviews and other attributes.
• Can receive notifications from the cloud.
• Support deep search across apps: Apps can implement an interface that enables the app container (generally the Web browser) to provide the user with a cross-app search experience that links deeply into any app that can satisfy the search.

Check out this demo to see more about our Open Web App prototype:

Please join us in exploring this Open Web App concept. Head over to the Mozilla Labs forum, leave a comment here and follow the Mozilla Labs blog for updates. As with everything Mozilla does, we’re developing this prototype and design for the public benefit in the open and we look forward to making this concept a reality.

Open Web App Ecosystem FAQ

Firefox 4 will streamline and modernize the Web experience for our hundreds of millions of users. In addition to greatly improving performance, adding advanced graphics capabilities, and rethinking how people use tabs to organize their online lives, we have also been looking closely at the search options that we include in the search box, which appears to the right of the URL bar.

The current search options fall into three categories: general search, shopping, and reference.

Google remains the most popular general search and it will remain as the default search option, unless you change it. We will also continue to include Yahoo! as the second option for general search.  Yahoo! has a loyal following and continues to provide a differentiated user experience, even as it integrates the Bing engine for its algorithmic search results. Bing itself offers a user experience that we think users will find valuable, and with its significant rise in popularity over the last year, we will also be including Bing as a general search option for English language users.

Amazon.com and eBay will continue to be included by default as popular choices for shopping search engines.

Wikipedia will also continue to be included by default as a popular reference search engine. We’ll be removing Answers.com and Creative Commons.  Answers.com is a good service but we have found and we have heard from our users that Wikipedia is more useful as an included reference search engine. The Creative Commons search engine has changed over the years from one focused on locating CC licensed materials  to one focused on providing a general search from Google, Yahoo! and others. We are huge fans of Creative Commons and will continue to actively support their organization and mission through grants and joint programs.

Overall these changes will mean that English-language versions of Firefox 4 will display the following search services, in this order: Google (default), Yahoo!, Bing, Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia. The choices available to our users will vary around the world.  Localizers of Firefox will have the option to add Bing to the set of included search engines if they believe it is in the best interest of users in their locales.

As always, Firefox will continue to provide users with complete control over their list of search engines, with access to a large gallery of search plug-ins and the ability to change the default search engine at any time. Also, any website can provide a search plug-in using the Open Search protocol.

Search Refresh FAQ

Firefox enables hundreds of millions of people all over the world to each have a Web experience that’s unique. They can make Firefox look and feel the way they want with Add-ons and Personas. And more importantly, Firefox becomes their trusted guide to the Web. It intelligently searches browsing history and bookmarks to help people get to their favorite sites with minimum effort using the “Awesome Bar”. Tabbed browsing allows people to efficiently work with multiple sites at the same time while Password Manager and automatic form fill help them quickly get things done.

But the world is changing. People access the Web from many devices, including their mobile phones. As people move through the day from their home computer to mobile phone to work computer and back again, the rich personalization provided by Firefox is sacrificed.

At the same time, faster networks, cheaper cloud storage, and more powerful hardware, especially on mobile devices, enable new possibilities.

Mozilla launched an exploration (the Weave project) into how multiple devices, connected through the cloud, could make the personal Web experience portable across multiple computers and devices, while providing unprecedented privacy protection. That exploration has resulted in a set of products, features and services that provide great user experiences and begin to create new possibilities for developers:

Firefox Sync (formerly Weave Sync) – Currently packaged as a free Firefox Add-on, Sync will be an integrated (opt-in, of course) feature of Firefox 4. It makes your bookmarks, history, Awesome Bar intelligence, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs accessible from Firefox running on other computers and mobile phones. And unlike cloud services that use your data to track your travels throughout the Web for ad targeting or other purposes, Firefox Sync encrypts all of your data before sending it to the server. This means you do not have to sacrifice any privacy or control while still getting the convenience of ubiquitous access to your data using Firefox Sync.

Firefox Home for iPhone – For users of Firefox Sync (don’t forget to install it on your computer today, so that you’re ready to go when Firefox Home for the iPhone arrives!), Firefox Home gives iPhone owners instant, secure access to the bookmarks and open tabs from Firefox on their computers, as well as a version of the Awesome Bar that quickly gets them to the right website. Firefox Home provides the comfort that comes from knowing you can quickly get to the information you need wherever you are. You’ve already done the work to find what you need on the Web. Why start all over again on your iPhone?

Developer API – Firefox Sync and Firefox Home are built upon open, simple and powerful REST APIs that you can use for your own applications. The User API enables account creation, authentication and other account-related actions. The Sync API handles data storage and retrieval. These APIs work hand-in-hand to provide a complete end-to-end synchronization service. All of our code is open source, including that for the server, which means you can even run your own servers if you want.

We’re building services that make the user experience more personal, portable and privacy-protected while providing developers with a platform and tools that are easy, effective and extensible. Join us by trying Firefox Sync today and by learning more about how to build upon our platform. For more information about Firefox Home, check out our progress, updates and FAQ here.

Web developers are expressing interest in an app store model for the Web that would enable them to get paid for their efforts without having to abandon Web development in exchange for proprietary silos, each with their own programming language and SDK, variable and sometimes opaque review processes, and limited reach.

Supporting the needs of Web developers in their efforts to develop websites and apps that aren’t bound to a specific browser and work across the Web is core to Mozilla’s public benefit mission.

And so we’ve been actively exploring what an Open Web App Store would need to look like to ensure the long-term health and vitality of the Web as an incredibly open and accessible platform for innovation.

What does it mean to be an Open Web App Store? As a starting point, we are proposing a set of high-level principles.

Let’s start the discussion.  What do you think is important?