As the web browser wars continue to heat up, the developers of popular browsers are busy adding new features to gain more users.
Recently, Mozilla started rolling out multi-process in its Firefox browser and Opera brought the built-in VPN.
Now, Mozilla has announced Project Mortar to bring Chrome’s built-in plugins to Firefox web browser. By doing so, Mozilla aims to bring some particular plugins, which are absent in its library, to Firefox.
Project Mortar aims to make the development and maintenance of Firefox cheap and easier. This would be done by importing features from the world’s leading web browser Google Chrome.
In the beginning, Project Mortar will start off by bringing PDFium library and the Pepper API based Flash plugin to Firefox. PDFium is Chrome’s open source native PDF viewer and Google’s Pepper Flash player, which runs inside a sandbox for extra security.
This important change will allow Firefox web browser to run Chrome’s PDF viewer and Flash Player.
Mozilla calls this step an exercise to reduce the work done by Mozilla developers to write code for the technologies that are used to provide a better web experience but not a core piece of the web platform.
In other words, to make the web browsing experience better, Mozilla is agreeing to use APIs that are not considered web standards.
You can visit Mozilla’s website to find more information on Mortar Project.