Mozilla tests replace Firefox techniques with those of other browsers

Mozilla has started Project Mortar, with which it investigates which Firefox features can be replaced by alternatives to reduce development time. In initial tests, Mozilla uses some Chrome plugins.

With Project Mortar, Mozilla wants to reduce development time for techniques that are not a core part of a browser. “We are looking at ways to replace such techniques with existing alternatives, including implementations from other browser vendors,” said Johnny Stenback, who leads Mozilla’s development team.

He specifically mentions the possibility that Mozilla will internally use APIs that are not web-standards to reduce costs, although that would not be the preferred option. In one of the early parts of the project, Mozilla is testing substitutes for PDF rendering and Flash support. This should ultimately ensure that Mozilla can completely move away from the outdated npapi support for plugins.

Project Mortar is exploring the use of a minimal amount of Pepper APIs to use the PDFium library and the Pepper Flash plugin. PDFium is Chrome’s open source viewer and the Pepper Flash was developed by Adobe and Google as a secure player. Mozilla hopes to integrate the PDF viewer into Firefox in the first half of next year.