Mozilla News: Less Microsoft, No Persona, More Mono, and Less Intrusive Addons
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-18 16:58:13 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-18 16:58:13 UTC
Microsoft
Just days before it was due to be included in Firefox's stable version, Mozilla has announced that its Metro-mode shell for Firefox has been cancelled.
It's been a couple of years since Microsoft delivered Windows 8 and we have never seen the touch-capable "Metro" version of the Firefox browser, designed for Windows 8, that Mozilla had talked up so frequently. Google Chrome, on the other hand, has been available in a Windows 8 Metro version since 2012.
Persona
Over the years Google has started and then abandoned so mamy projects that some people like to say that the company "throws spaghetti at the wall to see what will stick." Now, as Mozilla is shifting its entire company strategy toward mobile technology and focusing on its Firefox OS platform, it may be heading in a similar direction. After touting and actively testing its Persona authentication and sign-on system, the company is stepping down its participation in the project, citing low adoption.
Mono
Mozilla and Epic Games have been working together for some time now, but it looks like they are set to take their partnership to the next level. Last year, the two companies demonstrated Unreal Engine 3, the basis for many games, running in the Firefox browser via the WebGL 3D graphics API and some offshoots of JavaScript. Now, Epic and Mozilla have announced that they are porting Unreal Engine 4 to the web.
Extensions
-
Sony recently submitted an enhancement which allows widget like functionality on Firefox OS. Dubbed gadget, it is supposed to allow easy interaction with applications from homescreen and lockscreen. Currently the implementation is being reviewed on bugzilla by the Mozilla team.
-
Early last year, I posted a piece on Mozilla radically changing its approach to plugins in the Firefox browser. Plugins and extensions are, of course, part of the reason why many of us chose to use Firefox in the first place. There is a huge ecosystem of useful ones. However, especially since Firefox moved to a rapid release cycle, extensions have cause many performance problems. For that reason, Mozilla has been steadily overhauling its process of handling extensions in Firefox, especially when it comes to extensions that are automatically enabled.
-
Mozilla announced back in January 2013 that it planned to eventually require all plugins to be ‘Click to Play’ by default, meaning that users will need to click on plugins in-page in order to enable them and view their content.
JPEG
-
Mozilla has announced a new open-source JPEG encoding library, which it says could significantly reduce the amount of network traffic used by the web.
Misc.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Datamation, Where I Used to Publish Articles, Appears to Have Been Sold to TechnologyAdvice Only to Become a Slopfarm
- I'd prefer to not associate with that site anymore
-
- For the Second Time in a Few Weeks Microsoft Lunduke Makes False Accusations Against Senior Red Hat Staff to Incite a Despicable 'Troll Army'
- Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims of says can be trusted
- FSF Turns 40
- We'll be focusing on patent-related topics this weekend
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 03, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, October 03, 2025
- Gemini Links 04/10/2025: Distro Hopping and "Part Time"
- Links for the day
- How Software Patents Were Viewed or Their General Status Changed Over Time
- A rough summary
- We Are Turning 19 in One Month, FSF Turns 40 in 3 Hours (CET)
- For our anniversary next month we still have no concrete plans
- Patent Docs (or PatentDocs) Learned the Wrong Lessons From the Death of TypePad
- Had they gone ahead with an SSG, they'd become a lot more future-proof
- USPTO Patent Bubble Already Imploding, After Decades of Artificial Inflation, Entire Offices Close for Good
- we can deduce that financial pressures (lack of "demand" for monopolies) play a role
- TikTok is Not Harmless (Being CheeTok in the US Will Advance Orange Agenda)
- Social control media isn't "fun and games"; it's a digital weapon that lets hostile groups or nations infiltrate others, then turn them against themselves
- Andy Farnell and Helen Plews Explain What "Modern" Tech Does to Old People
- Imposing terrible tech "religion" on people is not helping them
- Tomorrow the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 40 and Its Web Site is Still Slow Due to DDoS by LLM Slop Bots
- For an advocacy group, uptime is important (for its message to remain accessible)
- Slopwatch: Google News as a Firehose of LLM Slop About "Linux"
- Google News is really bad
- Links 03/10/2025: "NPR’s Economics Lessons Come With Neoliberal Spin" and Canada Post at Risk
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 03/10/2025: Panic Attacks and Food Adulteration
- Links for the day
- Links 03/10/2025: Lawyers Caught Using LLM Slop Explain Why They Did It, LibreSSL 4.1.1 and 4.0.1 Released
- Links for the day
- FSF Board Grew 50% Since Last Year, Has New President, Turns 40 in Two Days
- It's a good move for the FSF and - by extension - for software freedom
- Links 03/10/2025: Conflicts, Death of TypePad, and TikTok/CheeTok Gives a Boost to Far Right Groups in Europe
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 02, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, October 02, 2025
- Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Google News, and LinuxSecurity
- They carry on polluting the Web with fake articles
- Gemini Links 02/10/2025: Kubernetes With FreeBSD and robots.txt
- Links for the day
- Links 02/10/2025: 'Open' 'AI' Resorting to Gimmicks and Fake Funding, Europe’s ‘Drone Wall’ Discussed
- Links for the day
- Links 02/10/2025: Brave Passes 100M Users Milestone, Kodak Selling Its Own Film Again
- Links for the day
- Michael “Monty” Widenius: It Started in 1983 With Richard Stallman (RMS)
- The other co-founder of MySQL is a bit notorious for confronting RMS rather viciously
- su lisa && rm -rf /home/ibm/power
- Novell was ruined by another person from IBM, Ronald Hovsepian
- A Record Demand at Microsoft: Demand to Cancel
- What we're witnessing is a very ungraceful destruction of XBox
- Microsoft is Losing Europe
- Hence all the "support" and "discount" offers that are limited to Europe
- The Free Software Foundation Starts Fund-raising for 40th Anniversary
- New pop-up 2-3 days ahead of the 40th anniversary event
- Systemd Breaks Networking in Debian and Microsoft Staff Rushes to Make Face-Saving Excuses in LWN
- Microsoft's bluca is already there in the comments, his Microsoft money pays for LWN to let him leave comments early
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 01, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, October 01, 2025
- What the End of XBox Will Look Like: a Fiery Crash
- XBox is the next Skype. It won't last much longer. Expect many more layoffs.
- Richard Stallman is Going to Finland to Give a Talk Next Thursday
- A day later he speaks in Sweden
- Gemini Links 02/10/2025: SMTP Pipelining and End of ROOPHLOCH 2025
- Links for the day