In one of the emails Mozilla hinted that it wants to lean on to its add-on community and partners for browser features that can’t be built in-house. Performance problems go unfixed and it creates a lot of unnecessary complexity within Gecko. “We wanted to make the experience better for our OS X users ASAP rather than wait for it to be ready for all platforms”.
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In the future, Mozilla will make the most of the same technology to render itself that the Web does, and that’s good for everyone. As such, we can expect to see some of the effort typically reserved for developing new features to be diverted to bringing existing features up to snuff.
Contributing to Firefox gets easier because there is no need to learn what are essentially Mozilla-specific languages.
In a separate e-mail to firefox-dev, Camp outlined another big change for Firefox: XUL and XBL are going away, “but the discussion of how to do that is in the early stages”. Its main aim is to attract new users by focusing on distinguishing features like Private Browsing mode.
The firm will also deliver a browser for Windows 10, a reversal of a 2014 decision to stop work on a touch-based version of Firefox for Microsoft’s OS.
As for what will replace XUL and XBL, the jury is still out.
As told by the company all the messages of the app will stay indexed on the smartphone even though you chat in the web version. Without XUL, any add-on built with XUL would need a rewrite to work in the new browser UI. Camp isn’t sure which path is the correct one, and he asks developers to chime in if they have some feedback.
Mozilla did the latter last month when it baked the Pocket reading list app into Firefox. Firefox’s market share has trended steadily downwards for the last five years, mostly shedding its percentage points to Chrome. From off-the-record conversations with Mozillians, they don’t seem to be too fazed by the diminishing numbers; Mozilla’s mission isn’t to dominate the Web, after all.
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“Critical fixes should ship to users in minutes, not days”, it read, stating that the current “18-week cycle” the company now follows when releasing major updates is no longer acceptable in today’s internet.
