Mozilla, the well-known free web browser company, is funding a project to port Julia to Firefox and the browser environment in general. As announced on Friday by the browser creator, this project is being funded by Mozilla Research Grants, already in the middle of 2019.
That seems to have been the company's intention. Already when the application period for research grants opened, Mozilla said it was in the process of adding scientific data and scientific computing tools. In fact, it said it was interested in receiving submissions about browser-level support for R or Julia.
R and Julia are programming languages. R is an open source programming language that provides the user with the ability to do computational statistics and graphs. Julia is a dynamic programming language designed for high-performance numerical analysis and computational power.
Previously, as part of this project, Mozilla engineers ported the Python to run in the browser, using WebAssembly.
This project, called Pyodide, is an experimental Mozilla program for recording scientific Python data that runs entirely in the browser.
Last April, Mozilla announced its willingness to use a research grant to support a team of developers who would integrate R or Julia into the browser via WebAssembly. The result would be a Firefox plugin, similar to Pyodide.
Julia was created in 2009, publicly released in 2012, and has gained immense popularity since then. It has quickly risen to the ranks of the most popular languages in the world.
In April, Mozilla engineers also offered a grant to port Tor to Mozilla Firefox, to staff a Super Private Browsing (SPB) feature.
Finally, while there was no corresponding grant, Mozilla will begin supporting a research project that will study the performance and anonymity of protocols on the Tor network
