The Firefox team wants to rethink the browser

While major developments for the Firefox browser will land in mid-2016 with the multi-process and support for WebExtensions, the project called Tofino seems to arrive like a hair on the soup.

Members of the Mozilla Firefox team have three months to work on a browser overhaul in the broadest sense of the word. The assumption made by one of them is " design a browser that is not a browser ". An entire program.

Project Tofino is entirely focused on user experience explorations. In other words, there is no question here of the technological platform. It is about bringing out ideas to give a breath of fresh air and explore the concepts of using a browser imagined in 2016.

The series of experiments could be radical since it is suggested that the address bar, the tabs and the management of bookmarks so anchored in the idea that we have today of a browser can all to be turned upside down. As such, Project Tofino is exciting but could not lead to anything concrete.

Project-Tofino-sketchFor the prototypes, the members of the project feel at ease with the technologies Electron (HTML5 framework, JavaScript and others using Chromium) and React (JavaScript library of Facebook), and not technologies of Mozilla. Small discomfort … but that does not call into question the rendering engine Gecko and that experimental Servo for the future.