2012 has been a momentous year for the Internet despite the best efforts of lawmakers and International groups to knock it down a peg. Google and Facebook have already looked back over the year, and have shared some stats on what was trending over the last year. Now Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox browser, has prepared its own retrospective on the year that was 2012.
For Mozilla, the big event of the year was when Firefox hit 3 billion add-on downloads back in July. Firefox itself received numerous updates throughout the year culminating in Firefox 17 which added the Social API and Facebook Messenger for Firefox.
Sticking to Firefox, Mozilla also released a completely rebuilt version of its Android browser earlier this year. Since then, every update has made it faster and more reliable. The latest update, Firefox 17 for Android, made the mobile browser available to even more users with support for ARMv6 devices.
Mozilla also introduced Firefox OS this year. The mobile operating system is the new name given to Mozilla’s long-in-development Boot 2 Gecko project. The new OS will be available in smartphones launching in South America early next year. For now, developers can play around with the newly released Firefox OS simulator for PC, Mac and Linux.
What’s next for Mozilla in 2013? The non-profit says that it will continue to mature and evolve its browsers. One of the first steps is to continue development of its Social API and expand the “concept of what a browser can be.” Mozilla also says that it will continue to mobilize the community to “make and build the world that we want based on this amazing, open, transparent, powerful and humbling thing we call the Web.”
