Announcing Project Mortar

In order to enable stronger focus on advancing the Web and to reduce
the complexity and long term maintenance cost of Firefox, and as part
of our strategy to remove generic plug in support, we are launching
Project Mortar.

Project Mortar seeks to reduce the time Mozilla spends on technologies
that are required to provide a complete web browsing experience, but
are not a core piece of the Web platform. We will be looking for
opportunities to replace such technologies with other existing
alternatives, including implementations by other browser vendors.

In order to keep costs low, we may use APIs internally that are not
considered web standards. These APIs will not be exposed to the web.
Solutions that both reduce our support cost, achieve the desired user
experience, and make use of web standards will be preferred.

The project will start by investigating how Firefox handles PDF
rendering followed by looking into lower cost approaches to providing
Flash support as it’s usage continues to decrease. Project Mortar is
currently investigating using the minimum set of Pepper APIs needed to
support the PDFium library and the Pepper Flash plugin. If successful,
this work will allow us to completely remove NPAPI support from
Firefox once NPAPI is disabled for general plugin use.

Keep an eye on https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project for status and
future updates for this project.

- jst
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