Process separation is one of the cornerstones of the Firefox security model. Instead of running Firefox as a single process, multiple processes with different privileges communicate with each other via Inter-Process Communication (IPC). For example: loading a website, processing its resources, and rendering it is done by an isolated Content Process...

Mozilla’s recently announced Builders program supports projects that advance the cause of open source AI. Our inaugural theme is “Local AI”: AI-powered applications that can run entirely locally on consumer devices like desktops, laptops, and smartphones. We are keenly interested in this area because it fosters greater privacy and control by putting...

As discussed on Mozilla Connect, Firefox 130 will introduce an experimental new capability to automatically generate alt-text for images using a fully private on-device AI model. The feature will be available as part of Firefox’s built-in PDF editor, and our end goal is to make it available in general browsing for users with screen readers. Why alt...

When Mozilla’s Innovation group first launched the llamafile project late last year, we were thrilled by the immediate positive response from open source AI developers. It’s become one of Mozilla’s top three most-favorited repositories on GitHub, attracting a number of contributors, some excellent PRs, and a growing community on our Discord server....

Firefox’s crash reporter is hopefully not something that most users experience often. However, it is still a very important component of Firefox, as it is integral in providing insight into the most visible bugs: those which crash the main process. These bugs offer the worst user experience (since the entire application must close), so fixing them is...

As an industry, generative AI is moving quickly, and so requires teams exploring new ideas and technologies to move quickly as well. To do so, we have been using Gradio, a low-code prototyping toolkit from Hugging Face, to spin up experiments and experiences. Gradio has allowed us to validate concepts through prototyping without large investments of...