Astonishing and innovative Mozilla's projects
The Firefox browser has changed the Web by introducing innovations adopted by all competitors, such as themes and extensions. But its publisher, Mozilla has also many other projects ...
- Firefox OS is an operating system for mobile phones based on Firefox and WebAPI for applications entirely in HTML 5 and new web technologies. Many mobile manufacturers are willing to adopt it.
- Asm.js is a subset of JavaScript operating at twice the speed of the binary code. You can port software written in C++ to Asm.js to run in the browser or libraries to extend JavaScript.
- TowTruck goes beyond comments on websites. If you add the two lines of JavaScript needed on a page, visitors can chat between them and possibly participate in the development of something.
- Firefox was considered the best browser since 2004, until the arrival of Chrome in 2008. Firefox has been a source of inspiration for the browser makers, a role that is now shared with Chrome.
Firefox 4 - The open source Thunderbird mail client is the main competitor to Microsoft's Outlook (like Firefox was to IE before Chrome).
- The Rust programming language is a system language designed specifically for the Web. It offers more security and better performances in multi-user environment. It is used to write Servo, the future rendering engine of Firefox.
- Chromeless browser written in HTML 5 was an experimental project . The advantage envisioned was that the same rendering engine with hardware acceleration, can display both the software interface and web pages.
- XUL is a XML-based user interface language that inspired XAML to Microsoft, that appeared with Vista, before user interface languages are popularized in a syntax similar to C, including QML and JavaFX.
XULRunner est the common runtime for all applications using a XUL interface. This is the case of Firefox, Thunderbird.
You may even submit your ideas for new Mozilla projects to Concept series.
More conventional tools and future projects
- Bugzilla. Debugger and software development manager.
- Songbird. Audio software with Web access.
- Sunbird. Calendar.
- Raindrop. As Chromeless explores the way for a new browser, Raindrop tries to imagine the future of messaging.
- Zaphod. Plug-in to run the experimental Narcissus JavaScript engine.
- Hekad. Statistical tool which observes and displays the activity on a server. It competes with Riemann and CollectD but its goal is to be really simple. The Go language has been choosen to create this tool preferably to C, Perl and to Rust which is not ready to production.