May 15, 2025 08:00:00

Official GitHub repository for Mozilla's web browser Firefox now available

The official GitHub repository for

Firefox , a web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation, has been launched.

GitHub - mozilla-firefox/firefox: The official repository of Mozilla's Firefox web browser.
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox

Firefox Source Code Now Hosted On GitHub - Phoronix
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-On-GitHub

Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo | Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43969827

On the social news site Hacker News, jgraham , a Mozilla employee, explains that the Firefox source code has been made public on GitHub.

The Mozilla Foundation has long used

Mercurial as a version control system, but has announced that it will migrate from Mercurial to Git in November 2023. As a result, the official home of Firefox has also migrated from Mercurial on the Mozilla.org server to GitHub.

At the time of writing, the move to GitHub only affects the code, and in the short term, the Mercurial server still exists and is synced from GitHub. In addition, Bugzilla is still used as the bug management system, Phabricator is used for code review, and the task execution framework Taskcluster is used for continuous integration (CI) , jgraham explains.

According to jgraham, the difference for contributors won't be that big, but on the Mozilla backend, the move to GitHub will reduce the time it takes to host its own version control system infrastructure, which is a big challenge for the scale, performance, and availability required for such a large project.

In a response to a question posted by jgraham, he pointed out that read and write performance can be an issue for large repositories: new contributors first have to clone the repository, and if this operation takes a long time, it can be problematic, especially for people with unreliable internet connections.

Jgraham also noted that Mozilla's HTML rendering engines,

Gecko and Firefox, have used Bugzilla for over 25 years, and that replacing Bugzilla with GitHub is a high-risk project because there are many internal workflows, tools, and processes that are heavily dependent on specific Bugzilla features.