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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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