Mozilla products are built to contribute to a healthy internet and deliver an amazing user experience. We measure our success not only by the adoption of our products, but also by our ability to increase the control people have in their online lives, our impact on the health of the internet, our contribution to standards, and how we work to protect and build the web that users need and want.

With these broader aims in mind, Mozilla launched new Firefox products in 2016 across desktop and mobile platforms, with multi-process technology creating a faster experience for desktop users, as well as major updates of Firefox for iOS and Android. We also launched a new version of Firefox Focus for iOS (Firefox Klar in German-speaking countries) as a privacy focused browser that automatically blocks trackers. This work paved the way for the Android release of Firefox Focus in 2017.

We also invested in major experiments through programs like Firefox Test Pilot and Mozilla Emerging Technologies. These efforts help us to develop our new products in alignment with what our users seek, and help us to foster web technologies along with the technology community to further evolve the open web. These developments led to new features like Firefox Screenshots, with over 16 million screenshots created every month, and Activity Stream, which were all launched in the fastest Firefox yet, Firefox Quantum in November 2017.

Project Quantum powers the new Firefox, and was initiated in 2016 by combining the hard work of Quantum Flow with a new interface, Photon, and technologies like the Rust programming language and components of Servo such as Stylo and Webrender. Both Rust and Servo result from our long-term R&D investments for safety, performance, and interoperability in the web ecosystem.

The web platform took a major step forward in 2016 with new versions of WebAssembly and WebGL 2 released, enabling unheard of performance for web applications. Additional progress was made with AV1 and the Open Media Alliance to achieve a video codec that performs better than existing solutions. In addition, with A-Frame as a platform for developers & WebVR released in Firefox Nightly in 2016 and then in 2017 to all users, Mozilla contributed to a growing ecosystem that supports content creation that works across multiple platforms.

In 2016 Mozilla Corporation continued its relationship with Read It Later, Inc. the developers of Pocket. Pocket began as a Firefox Add-on nearly a decade ago and has become known as the world’s leading “save and read it later” solution across devices and platforms. Pocket currently has more than 10 million active monthly registered users and is integrated into hundreds of leading apps. The relationship deepened resulting in Mozilla Corporation acquiring Read It Later, Inc. in 2017. It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Corporation with roughly 30 employees.

In all of our work in product and technology, transparency is a key part of how Mozilla gains and maintains trust in the global environment in which we work. As an open source project that relies on open development, we build transparency into the way we write our code - even working to open source the code that was acquired when Mozilla Corporation completed the acquisition of Read It Later, Inc. Additionally, we focus on describing how we handle user data not just in our privacy policy, but through “in context notices” to users as a way to create deeper opportunities for understanding and choice. With this transparency in mind, we publish bi­-annual transparency reports that help provide additional transparency to government disclosures and takedown requests.