At the crossroads of strategic autonomy, open source, supply chain security, and day-to-day high-attack-surface component, we only find one element: the browser. Firefox’ browser engine, Gecko, is to date the only cross-platform not based on Blink which is controlled by Google. To be able to sustain our long term goals for the community and our mission, we think it is time to build a branch of Mozilla that enables the ecosystem to leverage a product built specifically with enterprise deployment in mind. We aim at building a new product that ensures a new funding source for the engine, while addressing the challenges required by enterprises and governments: supply chain security, resiliency, support, all this with increased security features that can only be deployed with an infrastructure backend. To that effect, we are building strategic partnerships that are helping us learn how to operate this new version of Firefox both on-prem and in SecNumCloud certified clouds in order for users to have increased control over their data and the associated services typically needed by a modern browser. .
In this talk, we propose to start with a quick state of affairs for the architecture and services behind a modern browser, explore the landscape of the enterprise-focused browser ecosystem, and describe how Mozilla is building something strong for the users, that can benefit their security and increase their sovereignty. Finally, we provide some feedback on the challenges we face, going from customers needs, raising security, improving supply chain control, the legal compliance and infrastructure deployment, and how that works in the open.