We’ve blogged before about how we’ve built the health report with privacy in mind and what our plans for it look like, but our long term hope for the feature goes well beyond the report you see today. As the health report uncovers patterns of problems in Firefox, we can build better support information for our users. In many cases, we will be able to detect these problems before they get out of hand, and your browser can start healing itself. The health report is enabled by default in Firefox but, if you don’t want your browser health information added to the pool, you can disable data sending either from the report itself, or from the Firefox preferences window.

Firefox already protects and heals itself in numerous ways (automatically blocking insecure and unstable plugins, restoring tabs and content after crashes, detecting phishing and malware sites before they can attack) and the Firefox Health Report gives us a powerful new tool. If you’re curious about what’s going on under the hood, you can find the health report in your Help menu. If you’re not, rest assured that we’re fascinated by this stuff, and we’ll use it to make Firefox the smoothest, fastest, most excellent way for you to live your life on the web.

Johnathan Nightingale
Vice President of Firefox Engineering

Today, Epic and Mozilla are making the Epic Citadel demo available, so that you can try it out for yourself. For best results, we suggest using a newer version of Firefox Nightly (Firefox 23 or better) which includes optimizations for asm.js and support for Web Audio API. The demo will also run in Firefox 20 (the current released version) because the core technologies are just standard web technologies, but there will be some performance degradation and a lack of Web Audio-dependent audio effects. The demo will also work in other browsers but it heavily depends on the quality of the WebGL implementation, memory management and JavaScript engine.

To achieve the performance that makes these advancements possible, Mozilla developed asm.js, a highly-optimized subset of JavaScript that enables Emscripten-compiled applications to reach near-native performance.  This baseline performance enables developers to create visually compelling and fast gaming experiences on the Web.  With this technology, the Web simply becomes just another target platform for developers.

If you’re a games developer and want to learn more, please visit the new Mozilla Developer’s Network Games landing page, which we’ll be expanding in the coming weeks. The Emscripten project and information about asm.js are also useful if you’d like to take a look at what it would take to port your own games or other apps.

For a quick snapshot of what you’ll see in the Epic Citadel demo, here’s a video (now in 1080p), as well as some gameplay footage from the unreleased “Sanctuary” demo.

Enjoy!

We will expand testing with additional social providers in Firefox Nightly, including CliqZ and Mixi, MSN Now and Weibo soon.

We are really excited about the possibilities that Social API brings to the future of browsing including ways to integrate even more social providers, e-mail, finance, news and other applications and services into your Firefox experience. Stay tuned for more details and when we start beta testing the the additional social providers.

• More Do Not Track Options: Do Not Track includes three options “Do Track,” “Do Not Track” and “no preference” to better represent user’s choice to opt-in or opt-out of online tracking. To access the Do Not Track options and indicate your preference click on “preferences” then “privacy.”
• Restore thumbnails on new tab page: If you close a tab thumbnail on the new tab page there will be an option to “undo” and restore your thumbnail.

For more information:

• Get Firefox Beta for Windows, Mac and Linux
• Release notes for Firefox Beta on Windows, Mac and Linux

• Per-tab private browsing: Firefox for Android Beta comes with new per tab private browsing, allowing you to switch between private and standard tabs within the same browsing session. Private Browsing helps protect your privacy online and provides greater control over your personal data by allowing you to browse the Internet without saving any information about which sites and pages you’ve visited. Private browsing data will not show up in your AwesomeBar History or Awesome Screen shortcuts.
• Customizable shortcuts on the home screen: Now, you can customize the shortcut images on the home screen with your favorite or most frequently visited sites so they are only a click away. Tap and hold your top sites, tap “pin,” and you’re ready to go.
• ARMv6 Expanded Support: Firefox for Android Beta adds support for additional ARMv6 processor devices. This update brings Firefox for Android Beta to roughly 25 million more devices. Firefox for Android Beta is now available to phones with minimum requirements of 600MHz, 384MB, QVGA. New devices supported include: Samsung Galaxy Next (GT-S5570, GT-S5578), HTC Aria (S31HT), HTC Legend (A6363), Samsung Dart (SGH-T499), Samsung Galaxy Pop (SCH-i559), Samsung Galaxy Q (SGH-T589)

For more information:

• Get Firefox Beta for Android
• Release notes for Firefox for Android Beta

• Per Window Private Browsing Mode: Firefox makes it possible for you to view a Web page in private browsing mode and regular browsing mode simultaneously, in two separate Firefox windows. You can easily open a link in a new Private Browsing Window, just right click on any link and choose “Open Link in a New Private Window.”
• Updated Firefox Download Manager: Firefox makes downloading content from the Web even easier. You can view and monitor download progress right in the Firefox toolbar rather than a separate window.

• Plug-in warning: When a plug-in hangs for more than 11 seconds, Firefox will notify you so you can restart the plugin rather than restarting Firefox, allowing you to keep browsing the Web, uninterrupted.
• getUserMedia: A new HTML5 DOM API that allows the browser to capture local camera and/or microphone streams directly, without the need for third party plugins . It allows JavaScript developers to quickly and easily write code to access the user’s camera or microphones. gUM is the first API component of WebRTC, which enables real-time, interactive, peer-to-peer audio/video calls and data sharing.
• Developer Toolbox: Firefox Beta now includes the developer toolbox, providing quick access to popular developers tools such as the Web Console, Debugger, Inspector and Style Editor in one handy window.
• Canvas Blend Modes: Canvas Blend Modes allows developers to define how they want canvas to draw an image over an existing image, for example by changing pixel color values to create different visual effects.

For more information:

• Get Firefox Beta for Windows, Mac and Linux
• Release notes for Firefox Beta on Windows, Mac and Linux

One of the best aspects of working on a team that is producing open source solutions is seeing what people do with it. We continue to be amazed by how people leverage the technology that we share with them, specifically when it comes to video games.

Back in August, 2012, Mozilla Games developed a demo called BananaBread that provided a glimpse of the promise of highly responsive 3D games on the Web with no plugins. We demonstrated how to cross compile C++ code and convert it into a web application using a tool we developed called Emscripten. The demo was aimed at inspiring developers and others that the Web was more capable than they believed.

One individual saw this and emailed us to learn more. His name was Anthony Liot and he works for ACTISKU, creator of 3D real-time marketing solutions. He works with a 3D engine called Unigine. This engine was developed with multi-platform capability and is used in games, simulation, visualization and virtual reality systems and other projects including UNIGINE’s benchmarks (Heaven, Valley and others) and Oil Rush naval strategy game. Anthony, passionate in his search for a way to bring great 3D graphics with no plug-in to the Web, decided to see if he could successfully port this engine to the Web.

Over the course of several months, Anthony exchanged e-mails with Alon Zakai, the lead developer of Emscripten, with updates. Working on his own to port a very large and intensive code base, he only needed minimal support from Mozilla. This included the occasional questions or bug fix requests to the Emscripten cross compiler. His progress was constant and with each new demo, the quality of the rendering continually improved. Today, ACTISKU and Unigine are sharing Anthony’s work with the public, using a well-known benchmark demo developed by Unigine, it demonstrates just what can be done using such technology. I hope you will find the results as impressive as we have.

The following real-time demo is visually stunning. Crypt, the name of the demo, is a non-interactive benchmark that was designed to make sure that all of Unigine’s rendering engine is working on a new platform. This is a solid first step towards getting the full Engine ported over, we look forward to what the future holds for such 3D projects on the Web!

Check out this impressive 3D demo and let us know what you think.

You can join the conversation on our IRC server at irc.mozilla.org, channel #games.

Or sign up for the mailing list at https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/community-games

Links to related posts

- Actisku – About the demo

- Unigine – About the 3D Gaming engine

For a number of years there have been several plugins for viewing PDF’s within Firefox. Many of these plugins come with proprietary closed source code that could potentially expose users to security vulnerabilities. PDF viewing plugins also come with extra code to do many things that Firefox already does well with no proprietary code, such as drawing images and text. These problems, and the desire to push the boundaries of the HTML5 platform, led Andreas Gal and Chris Jones to start a research project they named PDF.js. The project quickly picked up steam within Mozilla Labs, where it grew into a full-fledged PDF viewer.

Today, the PDF.js project clearly shows that HTML5 and JavaScript are now powerful enough to create applications that could previously have only been created as native applications. Not only do most PDF’s load and render quickly, they run securely and have an interface that feels at home in the browser. As an added benefit of using standard HTML5 API’s, the PDF viewer is capable of running on many platforms (PC’s, tablet, mobile) and even different browsers. Last, performance will only get better as JavaScript engines and rendering performance continue to improve in browsers.

You can try PDF.js now by downloading Firefox Beta and filing any bugs you find here. The PDF.js powered viewer in Firefox Beta is the first step to it becoming a fully integrated feature within the release version of Firefox so its benefits can be enjoyed by all Firefox users. The PDF.js team is always looking for contributors to help improve our open source, community driven project. See our github page for more information on contributing to the project.

Thanks to all those currently contributing to the project, without them this project wouldn’t have been possible.

- Bill Walker, Engineering Manager & Brendan Dahl, Software Engineer

Firefox for Android Beta includes easy-to-use add-ons that let you change the look of Firefox without getting in the way of your Web experience. You can personalize the look of your Firefox in just a few taps: visit addons.mozilla.org on your Android device, tap the “Personas” tab, select your favorite theme, and then save it to your browser by pressing “Keep it.” New (and old) themes will be automatically saved so you can easily change the look of Firefox any time.

Firefox for Android Beta also includes Firefox Integration in the Google Search Widget. Now you can launch a Google Search in Firefox for Android Beta, directly from your phone’s homescreen to make it easier and faster to search the Web on your mobile phone. To enable, tap the “Menu” button on your Android device, tap “Add” in the Menu, and then select Firefox under “Widgets.”

Firefox for Android Beta brings an amazing Web experience to even more people with Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese language support.

For more information:

• Get Firefox Beta for Android
• Release notes for Firefox for Android Beta

Firefox Beta helps developers test Firefox for Android or Firefox OS mobile Web apps from the desktop browser. To enable remote debugging, set devtools.debugger.remote-enabled to true.

For more information:

• Get Firefox Beta for Windows, Mac and Linux
• Detailed release notes for Firefox Beta on Windows, Mac and Linux