MOZILLA UNVEILS STRATEGIC PLAN TO BUILD A HEALTHY WEB THROUGH FIREFOX AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES

MOZILLA
UNVEILS STRATEGIC PLAN TO BUILD A HEALTHY WEB

THROUGH FIREFOX AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES

SINGAPORE, 25
May 2017 –
Mozilla, the champion for an open and freely accessible Internet, today
outlined its ongoing efforts to raise awareness of the importance of Internet
health and launched several new initiatives and product features for Firefox, all of
which are aimed at ensuring users have a smooth, seamless and secure experience
when accessing the Internet.

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, Mozilla’s
Chief Marketing Officer, confidently shared how the non-profit organisation has
been making strides towards achieving its goal of building the next-generation
Web and fueling the movement for an open Internet. “Launched in April this
year, the latest version of Firefox, our
flagship browser, is the culmination of Mozilla’s efforts over the last two
years to deliver a next-generation browser that can meet the demands of tomorrow’s Web,” he shared.

“Mozilla is built on the
principles of online privacy, data protection and user trust. Besides being
faster and more stable, Firefox version 53.0 also offers users greater privacy
and security and facilitates the move towards a healthier Internet.”

Committed to making the
Internet better

Mozilla had earlier this year
released its first annual report on the Internet’s state of health – an open
source initiative that documents and explains what is happening to the health
of the Internet. Titled Internet Health Report, it is a prototype of a
community-driven effort led by Mozilla to encourage the public to develop a
greater awareness and understanding of the Internet. Using data that it had
collected on five key issues, the organisation hopes to cultivate a gathering of
like-minded corporations, organisations and individuals that will collaborate
to prevent ransomware infections and data breaches as well as help stem the
proliferation of inaccurate news reports has led to the topic of Internet
health recently taking centre stage.

In 2015, Mozilla teamed up with
many companies to announce Let’s
Encrypt, a new certificate authority that makes it easy and free to add
HTTPS to any website, protecting the privacy of users, while offering some
guarantee they are not looking at spoof pages. While the use of encrypted
connections are the norm for banking and e-commerce, such secure connections
previously were not considered as necessary for other websites. Since its
launch, the new certificate authority has made more than 24 million websites
safer for use. Moreover, Rust, an open source programming language born out of
collaboration between Mozilla and 1,500 contributors, is specially designed to
ensure that several major types of security vulnerabilities are prevented,
including the one that lead to the famous Heartbleed vulnerability.

Making the mobile Web safe

The rising popularity of
smartphones and the mobile Web amongst an increasingly technology-savvy
generation of global citizens has resulted in prevalent concerns of one’s
privacy and security being jeopardised while online. A staunch advocate against
data tracking and mining, Mozilla placed private browsing at the forefront of
the user experience when it released its Firefox Focus mobile web browser for iOS users, which by
default blocks ad trackers, and erases one’s browsing history, including
passwords and cookies with a single tap. Launched in November 2016, the mobile
web browser is now available in 27 languages and an Android version is set for
release in the coming months.

Firefox improves user
experience with Project Quantum and WebAssembly propels the Internet’s
evolution

Project Quantum was an initiative
kicked off in late 2016 to develop Mozilla’s next-generation Web engine, taking
full advantage of modern hardware to power a fast and smooth user experience
and deliver significantly improved performance.

With the goal of delivering
“quantum leaps” in performance and other major improvements to users by the end
of 2017, Mozilla not only began shipping out a core part of its browser engine
with the launch of Firefox version 53.0, it also included WebAssembly.

With the emerging web standard,
web applications can run in browsers without a plug-in. This gives it the
potential to make applications more accessible to people all over the world,
significantly improve the Internet in the process. WebAssembly allows web
developers to publish games on the web with just a link and cut out the
application store middle man, which also entails a major win for gamers.
Moreover, WebGL 2 support has landed in Firefox, providing native-like gaming
experience to users.

A-Frame, an open-source
JavaScript framework created at Mozilla, makes building VR experiences much
more accessible to the web community and kickstart the creation of a content
ecosystem. The application of the A-Frame web framework ensure the success of
WebVR, an open standard Javascript API which allows anyone with a web browser
to experience immersive VR on almost any device. With luck, VR should start
appearing in standard general availability web browsers within the coming year.