Jacob Kastrenakes of The Verge just discovered that Mozilla is beginning to make a series of changes to Firefox that will make certain aspects of the browser operate a lot more like Chrome.
He added that "the changes are broadly designed to make Firefox more secure and stable, but they also have the downside of making it less customizable and potentially more of a resource hog."
In order to get where they wanted to go, Mozilla needs to institute a few key changes. The first one is that it is currently changing how extensions (which Firefox calls "add-ons") connect to the browser. Mozilla is beginning to require users that they use a new method that is very similar to what is used by Chrome and Opera.
While that means Firefox extensions may need to be rebuilt, it will also mean that Chrome and Opera extensions should be able to add Firefox support with minimal changes. "Developers who already support Chrome extensions will benefit since they will have one codebase to support instead of two," Mozilla writes in a blog post.
Mozilla is also beginning to require that all extensions go through a security check before they can be installed (currently, only extensions that are submitted to Mozilla's official add-ons gallery go through these checks). While there will be some way to get around this — mostly for developers — this means that every extension that the average person installs will have to pass through Mozilla.
For the most part, that is going to be a good thing. "Extensions that change the homepage and search settings without user consent have become very common, just like extensions that inject advertisements into web pages or even inject malicious scripts into social media sites," Mozilla wrote earlier this year.
There are obviously some huge security issues in letting extensions run through a web browser unchecked, and Mozilla is beginning to change that.
The other updates relate to changing technologies inside of Firefox itself. For one, Firefox's behind-the-scenes tab management is soon going to work a lot more like the way Chrome handles tabs. Rather than running the browser and web content all together, Chrome splits them up so that the browser frame is separate from each individual browsing tab. It means that if one tab crashes, everything else can keep moving just fine, rather than the entire browser going down with it. There are also some security enhancements that come with tabs being kept independent of each other. This is essentially the model that Firefox is moving over to.
At first, Mozilla will simply be separating the browser and the web content into two items, but over time it sounds like the plan is to break apart each tab. That might lead to some of the resource issues that Chrome has, but there's a good argument to be made that it's a fair trade-off for stability and security.
Finally, Kastrenakes said that Mozilla is changing some of the underlying technology that it uses to build Firefox. That result is that extension developers are not going to be able to alter the browser in quite as deep of a way.
That is going to be a disappointment for some, but it's certainly not a reason for immediate outrage: Firefox has long been far more customizable than other browsers, but it was customizable in a way that could pose security and stability issues.
Currently, "add-ons have complete access to Firefox’s internal implementation" of core technologies, Mozilla writes. That's apparently also led to development slow downs, which Mozilla hopes to avoid by changing what extensions are capable of.
He added that "the changes are broadly designed to make Firefox more secure and stable, but they also have the downside of making it less customizable and potentially more of a resource hog."
In order to get where they wanted to go, Mozilla needs to institute a few key changes. The first one is that it is currently changing how extensions (which Firefox calls "add-ons") connect to the browser. Mozilla is beginning to require users that they use a new method that is very similar to what is used by Chrome and Opera.
While that means Firefox extensions may need to be rebuilt, it will also mean that Chrome and Opera extensions should be able to add Firefox support with minimal changes. "Developers who already support Chrome extensions will benefit since they will have one codebase to support instead of two," Mozilla writes in a blog post.
Mozilla is also beginning to require that all extensions go through a security check before they can be installed (currently, only extensions that are submitted to Mozilla's official add-ons gallery go through these checks). While there will be some way to get around this — mostly for developers — this means that every extension that the average person installs will have to pass through Mozilla.
For the most part, that is going to be a good thing. "Extensions that change the homepage and search settings without user consent have become very common, just like extensions that inject advertisements into web pages or even inject malicious scripts into social media sites," Mozilla wrote earlier this year.
There are obviously some huge security issues in letting extensions run through a web browser unchecked, and Mozilla is beginning to change that.
The other updates relate to changing technologies inside of Firefox itself. For one, Firefox's behind-the-scenes tab management is soon going to work a lot more like the way Chrome handles tabs. Rather than running the browser and web content all together, Chrome splits them up so that the browser frame is separate from each individual browsing tab. It means that if one tab crashes, everything else can keep moving just fine, rather than the entire browser going down with it. There are also some security enhancements that come with tabs being kept independent of each other. This is essentially the model that Firefox is moving over to.
At first, Mozilla will simply be separating the browser and the web content into two items, but over time it sounds like the plan is to break apart each tab. That might lead to some of the resource issues that Chrome has, but there's a good argument to be made that it's a fair trade-off for stability and security.
Finally, Kastrenakes said that Mozilla is changing some of the underlying technology that it uses to build Firefox. That result is that extension developers are not going to be able to alter the browser in quite as deep of a way.
That is going to be a disappointment for some, but it's certainly not a reason for immediate outrage: Firefox has long been far more customizable than other browsers, but it was customizable in a way that could pose security and stability issues.
Currently, "add-ons have complete access to Firefox’s internal implementation" of core technologies, Mozilla writes. That's apparently also led to development slow downs, which Mozilla hopes to avoid by changing what extensions are capable of.
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