Mozilla has initiated what is called Project Mortar and aims to replace the current plugins with a new solution. It hopes to decrease the cost of development and maintenance of Firefox.
One of the ways is using other browsers' solutions and the company is already experimenting by porting a couple popular ones. It has ported already the PDF viewer PDFium and the Flash player Pepper Flash.
As Google's Chrome has a strong plugin support it seems like the natural option for Firefox. This will allow the company to focus on the development of the so-called core features of the browser.
In order to enable stronger focus on advancing the Web and to reduce the complexity and long term maintenance cost of Firefox, and as part of our strategy to remove generic plugin support, we are launching Project Mortar.
Project Mortar seeks to reduce the time Mozilla spends on technologies that are required to provide a complete web browsing experience, but are not a core piece of the Web platform. We will be looking for opportunities to replace such technologies with other existing alternatives, including implementations by other browser vendors.Senior director of engineering at Mozilla, Johnny Stenback to Betanews
As Google's Chrome has a strong plugin support it seems like the natural option for Firefox. This will allow the company to focus on the development of the so-called core features of the browser.
