Mozilla and the Web
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Mozilla Accessibility: Cache the World Opt In Preview
Early last year, the Firefox accessibility team began work on a major project to re-design the browser’s accessibility engine. The accessibility engine is responsible for providing assistive technologies like screen readers with the information they need to properly and efficiently announce web page content.
Firefox’s accessibility engine dates back many, many years, having received a hurried but less than ideal update with Firefox’s move to a multi-process architecture about 5 years ago. The current Firefox multi-process accessibility architecture suffers from considerable, sometimes catastrophic performance issues and it is more costly and difficult to maintain than we’d like. These deficiencies prompted the team to design and build a newer, faster and more maintainable accessibility engine and the team has dubbed that project “Cache the World“. It’s called that because the new engine automatically sends information from web content processes to a cache in the browser’s main process for consumption by assistive technologies.
This week, the Cache the World project has reached sufficient completeness in the Firefox Nightly build for the Windows operating system that we are ready for some of you to try it out and let us know how it’s working.
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Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day: 06-2022 | Will's Blog
As people leave Mozilla, the libraries, processes, services, and other responsibilities (hidden and visible) all suddenly become unowned. In some cases, these things get passed to teams and individuals and there's a clear handoff. In a lot of cases, stuff just gets dropped on the floor.
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August 2022 Web Server Survey
In the August 2022 survey we received responses from 1,135,075,578 sites across 271,740,771 unique domains and 12,365,527 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 4.4 million sites, but a gain of 12,212 domains and 24,355 computers.
OpenResty saw the most significant change in web-facing computers, with a gain of 10,138 (6.1%). Furthermore, 2.8 million (3.1%) extra sites were seen since July, with a small loss of 466,322 domains (1.2%). This continues the trend of OpenResty’s fast growth in web-facing computers (46% since August 2021) while the number of domains and sites has not grown in tandem, remaining roughly static over the period.
nginx continues to be the most commonly used web server and saw modest gains of 25,053 domains (0.03%) and 13,481 computers (0.3%). However, we experienced a significant reduction in the number of nginx-hosted sites responding to our requests this month, with a loss of over 15 million. This represents around 4% of sites hosted using nginx in July.
Continuing the trend of strong growth over the past two months, Cloudflare gained an additional 4.4 million sites (6%) and 1.1 million domains (4.7%). This gives Cloudflare a total market share of 6.8% of sites and 9% of domains, an increase of 0.4pp on both metrics since July. Cloudflare also had the strongest growth amongst the top million busiest sites, gaining 0.25pp, thereby holding a 20.51% market share.
Apache’s position as the most commonly used web server for the top million busiest sites continues to erode, with a loss of 0.19pp this month. nginx continues to gain market share, up 0.07pp. If this trend continues, nginx will overtake Apache in the short term, and in the long term, Cloudflare will overtake both of its rivals.