Ehsan Akhgari is a programmer living in Toronto working for Mozilla. He has over 10 years of experience on browsers and the web platform and Firefox. Learn more about him here.
(Please note that this post does not reflect Mozilla's position or policies.)
Like many parts of our computing systems, some of the core parts of the Web platform weren't designed with security in mind and as a result, users are suffering to this date. The web platform has tried to provide a secure sandboxed environment where users can run applications from untrusted sources without the fear of their devices or data being compromised.
As part of my research on the various aspects of online advertising, one of the questions I have looked into is: why people dislike online ads? In this post, I'm planning to go over my findings as to the underlying reasons, again, similar to the earlier post, trying to avoid using the ad industry jargon as much as possible. Needless to say, none of this should be taken as official Mozilla position or policy.
I have researched various aspects of the online advertisement industry for a while, and one of the fascinating topics that I have come across which I didn't know too much about before is ad fraud. You may have heard that this is a huge problem as this topic hits the news often, and after learning more about it, I think of it as one of the major threats to the health of the Web, so it's important for us to be more familiar with the problem.
The Quantum Flow project started as a cross-functional effort to study and fix the most serious performance issues of Firefox affecting real world browsing use cases for the Firefox 57 release. Thanks to the hard work of everyone who helped us along the way, we believe that we have managed to fix a significant portion of the issues discovered in the past seven months or so that this project has run and have managed to achieve the performance goals that we had set for ourselves.
I hope you're not tired of reading these newsletters so far. If not, I applaud your patience with me in the past few months. But next week, as Firefox 57 will merge to the Beta channel, I'm planning to write the last one of this series.
Nightly has been pretty solid on performance. It is prudent at this point to focus our attention more on other aspects of quality for the 57 release, to make sure that things like the crash rate and regressions are under control.
As was announced earlier today, Firefox 57 will be merged to the Beta channel on September 21, which is two weeks from today. That wraps up the long development cycle that has gone on for maybe about a year now. We had a lot of ambitious plans when we started this effort, and a significant part of what we set out to deliver is either already shipped or landed on Nightly.