At Mozilla, we strive to offer users a great experience based on transparency, choice and trust, and to make Firefox available across many platforms, devices and operating systems. Today, Mozilla and Canonical are renewing their partnership to make Firefox the default browser for Ubuntu users. We are proud to have been a partner of choice for Ubuntu for over a decade. Canonical and Mozilla share a similar heritage as open-source and community-supported organizations.

Ubuntu version 16.04 will include the introduction of the snap infrastructure. With the snap format, we will be able to continually optimize Firefox on Ubuntu. Like our rapid engineering release cycle, snap format will allow us to provide Linux users the most up-to-date features, in particular security patches, even after major Operating System ship dates.

Previously, a static version of Firefox would ship with each new Operating System version for the lifecycle of that OS. With the snap format, new features can be released to users of older OS versions too. Later this year, we will offer Firefox in snap format making it easier to push the browser directly to users rather than relying on an intermediary to accept updates before they reach users.