The Mozilla Blog — How Firefox’s vertical tabs came to life with a little help from our community

If you’ve ever had more tabs open than you can count, you know the struggle: tiny, unreadable tab titles, constant scrolling, and that moment of panic when you close the wrong one. Enter vertical tabs, a long-requested Firefox feature designed to make tab management and multitasking easier. 

But this wasn’t just something we built overnight — getting it right took time, iteration, and a lot of feedback from our community. I spoke with Ania Safko, the product manager leading the charge on vertical tabs, about how the idea evolved — and how global community voices helped shape every step of the journey. 

A new way to manage tabs

We’re naturally wired to scan lists vertically — it’s how we read, process information, and navigate menus. Yet, browser tabs have traditionally been horizontal, which works fine — until you have more than 10 tabs open. At that point, finding the right tab isn’t just tedious, it’s downright overwhelming and frustrating. 

With vertical tabs, Firefox offers an alternative: tabs stacked along the side of your browser window, making it easier to organize, switch between tabs, and keep track of what’s open. This feature is especially useful for people who juggle multiple tasks and have lots of tabs open, need to remove distractions for deep focus, or just like a cleaner way to manage their tabs.

Recognizing the need for change

Vertical tabs weren’t just a shot in the dark. We’ve had signals of the feature’s value for years — requests in Mozilla Connect, popularity of third-party extensions for vertical tabs, and popular CSS customizations that the community was trying out and distributing. Many power users resorted to using multiple windows to compensate for crowded tab bars. The demand was clear, and we knew we’d disappoint a lot of folks if we got this wrong – so we set out to improve tab management for everyone.

It’s more than just turning tabs sideways

While the concept of vertical tabs sounds simple, making it work seamlessly was a big undertaking. Our core team of one product manager, one UX lead, five engineers (and multiple internal contributors) had to tackle a number of unique design and functionality challenges:

  • Balancing the need for a clean and minimalistic tab view with the need to see longer tab titles useful for many tasks.
  • Ensuring tabs remained easy to close, mute, and share, even in the minimalistic, collapsed mode. 
  • Balancing smart defaults with customizations: offer a useful experience right away while also allowing users to tweak things to their preference.
  • Ensuring performant and smooth animations for expanding and collapsing on a broad range of devices and OSs

We also wanted to build something that contributed to a better, more cohesive Firefox experience in the long run. That meant considering how vertical tabs would work with the existing tab management tools and future features, like tab groups.

The Firefox’s community shaped the vertical tabs feature

One of the biggest strengths of Firefox is our user community — and they played a major role in shaping vertical tabs. 

When we released an early version of vertical tabs in Firefox Nightly, feedback started pouring in. Early adopters helped us:

  • Improve stability and accessibility by testing vertical tabs on a variety of devices,operating systems, and pre-existing browser settings.
  • Polish user experience, by using it in real environments, for diverse and complex tasks, over weeks – something no amount of usability testing can replace.

Like many Firefox features, vertical tabs began as a small-scale experiment. The Mozilla team had been using this feature internally from day one – which helped spot bugs early, refine accessibility, and polish the interface in small but meaningful ways. Once external testing began, community feedback  became even more crucial –  both positive and negative. 

We especially appreciated hearing from long-time sidebar users on Mozilla Connect, who pointed out where the experience didn’t quite meet their expectations or disrupted their workflows. 

One key example: Originally, vertical tabs auto-collapsed when users opened a sidebar panel. While usability testing suggested this would save space, real-world users found this behavior cumbersome. We listened — and changed it.

Another experience shift came from a community discussion around expanding tabs on hover. A user suggestion reignited an internal conversation about the best implementation, leading us to refining existing implementation. The final version looks more polished and saves users extra space, thanks to community input.

Throughout the development, Ania was excited to see strong engagement from the Firefox’s international community. She often found herself responding in Ukrainian and Polish – her two native languages – to gather additional feedback, troubleshoot issues, or help users file bugs. She even jogged her memory of French and Spanish while translating notes from users in Mexico, France, and Colombia. For Ania, it was reassuring to see how much communities around the world cared about Firefox and actively contributed to making it better.  

Balancing different opinions

As with any new feature, opinions were divided. Some users loved the on-hover close button for collapsed tabs; others found it too easy to accidentally click. Instead of making a snap decision, we let the feature sit in Nightly, gathered more data, and are continuing to fine-tune it based on broader feedback.

Firefox browser window with vertical tabs and sidebar enabled, showing a tab preview for The Guardian and a customizable new tab page with frequently visited sites.

For us, balancing user habits with innovation is always a challenge. People get used to workflows, and even if a change ultimately improves usability, the initial adjustment period can be tough. That’s why we take an iterative approach — rolling out changes gradually, listening to real-world experiences, and making improvements along the way.

For Ania, this process reinforced the joy of building something that people feel passionate about. Seeing how different users engaged with vertical tabs — even when they had concerns — helped the team craft a better experience, ensuring that solutions met real needs of a diverse global community that chooses Firefox as their daily browser.

Thank you Firefox community

We couldn’t have done it without the community. Every bug report, suggestion and discussion helped make vertical tabs a better experience for everyone. Whether it was through Mozilla Connect, social media or direct feedback, users showed us what worked, what didn’t and what could be improved.

To all of you who shared your thoughts — thank you. Your feedback continues to shape Firefox, and we’re excited to keep building alongside you.

What’s next?

The launch of vertical tabs is just the beginning. We’ll continue refining the experience based on real-world usage and feedback, and we’re excited to see how people incorporate it into their browsing workflows.

If you haven’t tried vertical tabs yet, now’s the perfect time to give it a spin: navigate to Firefox Settings > General > Browser layout and switch the radio button to Vertical tabs. And as always, we’re listening — so let us know what you think!

Browser layout settings showing options for horizontal or vertical tabs, with vertical tabs and sidebar currently selected for quick access to bookmarks, synced tabs, AI chatbots, and more.
An illustration shows the Firefox logo, a fox curled up in a circle.

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The post How Firefox’s vertical tabs came to life with a little help from our community appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

The Mozilla Blog — Built together: How Firefox fans help shape the browser

Illustration of three hands pointing at a laptop screen displaying the Firefox logo, set against an orange and yellow grid background.

If you’ve ever wished Firefox had vertical tabs or an easier way to share links on your phone — and you left a comment somewhere asking for it — there’s a good chance someone saw it. And not just someone. The actual people building Firefox.

That’s the magic of Mozilla Connect. It launched in 2022 as a place where Firefox users and Firefox builders could actually talk to each other. No middlemen. No black box. Just real conversations, ideas, feedback, and yes — plenty of feature requests.

I spoke with Jon Siddoway, the community manager behind Mozilla Connect, about how it all got started. Before Mozilla Connect, there was a platform called Ideas@Mozilla. People could submit suggestions, but the tool wasn’t set up for real dialogue. “We needed something better,” Jon said. “A place where people could not only share ideas but also get updates, participate in discussions, and feel heard.”

“We wanted a space where people could share ideas and actually get updates on what happened next. It wasn’t just about collecting feedback — it was about building a community around it.”

Jon Siddoway, community manager for Mozilla Connect

So the team spent six months building something new — something built for conversation. Since then, more than 80,000 users have joined, and community input has directly influenced over 125 ideas that have made their way into Firefox and Mozilla products.

Jon explained it best: “We wanted a space where people could share ideas and actually get updates on what happened next. It wasn’t just about collecting feedback — it was about building a community around it.”

From “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” to shipping features

Right after Mozilla Connect launched, users jumped in with some big asks: vertical tabs, tab groups and better ways to manage profiles. Fast forward to now? All three are either being built or already starting to roll out.

Karen Kim, a product manager on Firefox desktop, remembers those early days well. “I loved the idea of  incorporating open community feedback earlier into our process of building our browser,” she said. “You have early adopters who are excited to try something even if it’s still rough around the edges. And their feedback? It adds real value. It’s a joyful moment when we can come back to an idea and tell people we now have the resources to build it. ”

 “I loved the idea of  incorporating open community feedback earlier into our process of building our browser,”

Karen Kim, product manager for Firefox desktop

She also shared that it’s not just about one-off requests — it’s about spotting patterns. “When you see the same idea pop up again and again from different people, that’s a strong signal. It helps us prioritize what to build next.”

When feedback flips the script

Andres Furlan, who works on Firefox for iOS, told us about a time when feedback totally changed the direction of a project. His team had redesigned the app’s toolbar, and posted the update on Mozilla Connect to get user reactions. “We were deciding whether to include the share and new tab buttons, and Mozilla Connect helped confirm it was the right move. We cross-checked it with user research and competitive benchmarks. Everything pointed in the same direction.”

And it’s not just about convenience. Sometimes feedback brings up things that weren’t even on the team’s radar. Like when Firefox removed night mode from iOS. “We deprecated night mode without realizing how many people relied on it for accessibility,” Andres recalled. “The posts started rolling in — almost 200 users requested we bring it back. And some shared how it helped with visual strain or low vision. That changed how I think about feature impact. It was a real eye-opener.”

Designing with users, not just for them

For both Karen and Andres, Mozilla Connect isn’t just for post-launch praise (or complaints). It’s become a tool for every phase of the product cycle — from exploring ideas, to testing prototypes, to validating decisions.

Andres shared how he used Mozilla Connect to post about an experimental menu redesign. “We got early feedback that it took too many clicks to access certain actions. That input helped us reevaluate the design before releasing it more widely.”

“On Mozilla Connect, people share constructive feedback. They explain their problem, suggest a solution. It helps me change my approach.”

Andres Furlan, product manager for Firefox iOS

And when changes spark strong reactions, Mozilla Connect becomes a two-way street. “We once made a security-driven change to private tabs,” Andres said. “Users weren’t happy. The Mozilla Connect thread got big. But it gave us a way to talk with them, explain why we did it, and figure out a compromise that worked.”

Yes, the internet can be nice

If you’ve ever read through App Store reviews, you know how intense (and unhelpful) some feedback can be. That’s why Andres values Mozilla Connect so much. “App Store reviews are mostly people yelling into the void. On Mozilla Connect, people share constructive feedback. They explain their problem, suggest a solution. It helps me change my approach.”

“You’ll see people responding to each other’s ideas, offering workarounds, or tagging us when something really needs attention. It’s collaborative in the best way.”

Jon Siddoway, community manager for Mozilla Connect

Mozilla Connect has a different vibe. “The feedback is actually helpful,” Andres said. “People say what’s not working and why — and they often suggest a fix. It’s the kind of conversation that helps us build better stuff.”

Jon shared that beyond feedback, Mozilla Connect is starting to feel like a true community. “You’ll see people responding to each other’s ideas, offering workarounds, or tagging us when something really needs attention. It’s collaborative in the best way.”

Jon uses a “gratitude tracker” to monitor all the ways users express appreciation on Connect – like thank-you messages and upvotes – while keeping an eye on the number of comments that require moderation. It helps the team strike a balance and lead with gratitude for the time and insights that users share. “It’s always overwhelmingly positive,” he said. “We’re seeing real conversations, not just complaints.”

Karen sees that positivity too. “There’s something really special about showing users we’re listening. Like when someone requested custom wallpapers for new tabs — and we could tell them, ‘Hey, we’re building that!’ You can feel the excitement on both sides.”

What’s on the horizon for Mozilla Connect

Mozilla Connect has grown a lot in the last few years, with more people joining and more teams across Mozilla using it to shape what’s next. Jon wants to expand it with community events, more product sneak peeks, even language-specific spaces. (We recently held an Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Firefox leaders that sparked incredible engagement  – and it’s clear people want to be part of the conversation.) Karen envisions more early-access opportunities for users to play, test and help shape features. And Andres? He’s using it to shape his entire roadmap.

“At the start of the year, Jon gave me a list of the top 10 concerns from the community,” Andres said. “That list basically guided everything we’re doing in Q1 – fixing pain points, improving basics, making sure the experience just works. That’s how we build trust.”

“We’re seeing real conversations, not just complaints.”

Jon Siddoway, community manager for Mozilla Connect

As Mozilla Connect enters its third year, the vision is clear: keep growing, but stay grounded in what works. That means more engagement from product teams, more ways for users to test early features (like Firefox Labs), and maybe even community events — virtual or in-person.

But the core mission won’t change: meaningful conversations between the people building Firefox and the people using it every day.

As Jon puts it: “It’s that middle space where we reach out, users reach out, and we meet in the middle.”

An illustration shows the Firefox logo, a fox curled up in a circle.

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The post Built together: How Firefox fans help shape the browser appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Open Policy & Advocacy — New Mozilla Research: Civil Liability Along the AI Value Chain

What happens when AI systems fail? Who should be held responsible when they cause harm? And how can we ensure that people harmed by AI can seek redress?

READ THE REPORT HERE

As AI is increasingly integrated in products and services across sectors, these questions will only become more pertinent. In the EU, a proposal for an AI Liability Directive (AILD) in 2022 catalyzed debates around this issue.  Its recent withdrawal by the European Commission leaves a wide range of open questions to linger as businesses and consumers will need to navigate fragmented liability rules across the EU’s 27 member states.

To answer these questions, policymakers will need to ask themselves: what does an effective approach to AI and liability look like?

New research published by Mozilla tackles these thorny issues and explores how liability could and should be assigned across AI’s complex and heterogeneous value chain.

Solving AI’s “problem of many hands” 

The report, commissioned from Beatriz Botero Arcila — a professor at Sciences Po Law School and a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society — explores how liability law can help solve the “problem of many hands” in AI: that is, determining who is responsible for harm that has been dealt in a value chain in which a variety of different companies and actors might be contributing to the development of any given AI system. This is aggravated by the fact that AI systems are both opaque and technically complex, making their behavior hard to predict.

Why AI Liability Matters

To find meaningful solutions to this problem, different kinds of experts have to come together. This resource is designed for a wide audience, but we indicate how specific audiences can best make use of different sections, overviews, and case studies.

Specifically, the report:

  • Proposes a 3-step analysis to consider how liability should be allocated along the value chain: 1) The choice of liability regime, 2) how liability should be shared amongst actors along the value chain and 3) whether and how information asymmetries will be addressed.
  • Argues that where ex-ante AI regulation is already in place, policymakers should consider how liability rules will interact with these rules.
  • Proposes a baseline liability regime where actors along the AI value chain share responsibility if fault can be demonstrated, paired with measures to alleviate or shift the burden of proof and to enable better access to evidence — which would incentivize companies to act with sufficient care and address information asymmetries between claimants and companies.
  • Argues that in some cases, courts and regulators should extend a stricter regime, such as product liability or strict liability.
  • Analyzes liability rules in the EU based on this framework.

Why Now?

We have already seen examples of AI causing harm, from biased automated recruitment systems to predictive AI tools used in public services and law enforcement generating faulty outputs. As the number of such examples will increase with AI’s diffusion across the economy, affected individuals should have effective ways of seeking redress and justice — as we have already argued in our initial response to the AILD proposal in 2022 — and businesses should be incentivized to take sufficient measures to prevent harm. At the same time, they should not be overburdened with ineffective rules and have legal certainty rather than facing a patchwork of varying rules across different jurisdictions in which they operate. A well-designed, targeted, and robust liability regime for AI could address all of these challenges — and we hope the research released today can contribute to a more grounded debate around this issue.

The post New Mozilla Research: Civil Liability Along the AI Value Chain appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

Web Application Security — Updated GPG key for signing Firefox Releases

The GPG key used to sign the Firefox release manifests is expiring soon, and so we’re going to be switching over to a new signing subkey shortly.

The GPG fingerprint is 14F2 6682 D091 6CDD 81E3 7B6D 61B7 B526 D98F 0353. The new signing subkey’s fingerprint is 09BE ED63 F346 2A2D FFAB 3B87 5ECB 6497 C1A2 0256, and it expires 2027-03-13.

The public key can be fetched from KEY files from the latest Firefox Nightly, keys.openpgp.org, or from below. This can be used to validate existing releases signed with the current key, or future releases signed with the new key.

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The post Updated GPG key for signing Firefox Releases appeared first on Mozilla Security Blog.

Open Policy & Advocacy — Mozilla Mornings: Unleashing PETs – Regulating Online Ads for a Privacy-First Future

Our first edition of Mozilla Mornings in 2025 will explore the state of online advertising and what needs to change to ensure a fairer, healthier, and privacy-respecting ads ecosystem where everyone stands to benefit.

The European regulatory landscape for online advertising is at a turning point. Regulators step up enforcement under the GDPR, the DMA and the DSA and industry players explore alternatives to cookies. Despite these advancements, online advertising remains an area where users do not experience strong privacy protections, and the withdrawal of the ePrivacy Regulation proposal can only exacerbate these concerns.

The industry’s reliance on invasive tracking, excessive profiling, and opaque data practices makes the current model deeply flawed. At the same time, online advertising remains central to the internet economy, supporting access to information, content creators, and journalism.

This Mozilla Mornings session will bring together policymakers, industry experts and civil society to discuss how online advertising can evolve in a way that benefits both users and businesses.

  • How can we move towards a more privacy-respecting and transparent advertising ecosystem while maintaining the economic sustainability of the open web?
  • How can regulatory reforms, combined with developments in the space of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and Privacy-Preserving Technologies (PPTs), provide a viable alternative to today’s surveillance-based advertising?
  • And what are the key challenges in making this shift at both the policy and technological levels?

To discuss these issues, the panel will welcome:

  • Rob van Eijk, Managing Director at Future of Privacy Forum
  • Svea Windwehr, Associate Director Public Policy at Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • Petra Wikström, Senior Director Public Policy at Schibsted
  • Martin Thomson, Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla

The discussion will also feature a fireside chat with Prof. Dr. Max von Grafenstein from Einstein Center Digital Future at the UdK Berlin.

  • Date: Wednesday 9th April 2025
  • Time: 08:45-10:15 CET
  • Venue: L42, Rue de la Loi 42, 1000 Brussels

To register, click here.

The post Mozilla Mornings: Unleashing PETs – Regulating Online Ads for a Privacy-First Future appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

The Mozilla Blog — Spring cleaning? Watch out for these product categories while online shopping

Illustration of an online shopping website with warning icons over a shopping cart, five-star review, and credit card, along with a magnifying glass and a checkmark symbol, representing scrutiny of online product reviews.

Spring is in the air, which means it’s time to swap stuffy winter layers to fresh air — and maybe confront the dust bunnies that moved in while you were busy. If you’re gearing up for a deep Spring clean or some much needed home maintenance, chances are you’re heading online to stock up on supplies. But before you fill up that cart, let’s talk about something a little less refreshing: the flood of unreliable product reviews that can make finding quality products harder than it should be. 

Discounted prices? Thousands of five-star reviews? That must mean it’s a great buy, right? Not always. Some of the trendiest products come with a bummer: unreliable reviews. That’s where Fakespot comes in. 

Fakespot is your secret weapon for smarter online shopping. The AI-powered browser extension helps millions of shoppers make better purchasing decisions by analyzing product reviews as you shop on Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and more. It identifies which product reviews are reliable and can flag when extra caution should be considered in the product pages. Whether shopping for cleaning supplies or home upgrades, Fakespot’s Review Grades offer a clear A-F rating system to help navigate review reliability. It also evaluates seller credibility on platforms like eBay and Shopify, ensuring consumers can shop with confidence across the web.

Reliable reviews aren’t just about trust — they’re about saving you time, money, and frustration. A product propped up by fake reviews might seem like a steal, but if it falls apart after one use or doesn’t work as promised, you’re stuck dealing with returns or, worse, adding to the landfill. When you shop with confidence using Fakespot, you’re not just avoiding duds — you’re making smarter choices that keep quality products in your home and bad ones out of your cart (and the trash).

Breaking down the most & least reliable home products — according to reviews

Fakespot analyzed customer reviews on Amazon to highlight the categories with the most and least trustworthy feedback. Before you stock up on cleaning supplies or home upgrades, here’s what to know: 

Categories you can count on

When it comes to these spring refresh essentials, the reviews are as trustworthy as they get.

  • Furnace Filters (82% reliable) — Not the most glamorous buy, but absolutely necessary. If you haven’t swapped yours in the last 3-6 months, consider this your sign. The good news? You can trust the reviews when picking a replacement.
  • Shower Curtain Liners (80% reliable) — A purchase no one gets excited about, but at least you don’t have to stress over fake reviews. Swap out that soap-scummed liner with confidence.
  • Horizontal Blinds (79% reliable) — Let the light in and upgrade those dusty blinds. The reviews in this category shouldn’t leave you in the dark.
  • Tools & Home Improvement (79% reliable) — Whether you’re stocking a new toolbox or tackling a weekend project, these reviews are as solid as the tools themselves.
  • Dish Cloths & Towels (75% reliable) — TikTok loves Swedish dishcloths, and if you’re thinking about making the switch, the reviews here will steer you in the right direction.
  • All-Purpose Cleaners (74% reliable) — Restock your go-to cleaner or try that trendy pink goop—either way, the reviews are scrubbing up strong.
Two side-by-side lists comparing product categories. The left side shows categories with the most reliable reviews (e.g., furnace filters, shower curtain liners), marked with a smiley face and thumbs-up. The right side shows categories with the most unreliable reviews (e.g., ultrasonic repellers, steam cleaners), marked with red flags.

Categories to be wary of

The reliability of these product reviews may be questionable. With each product category with a high number of unreliable reviews, we’ve included a product with an A or B review grade.  

  • Ultrasonic Repellers (65% unreliable) — Uninvited critters moved in over the winter? Bad news: more than half of the reviews on these so-called solutions might be unreliable. While we can recommend a reliable alternative such as a trap or spray, this might be a case for the exterminator.
  • Pressure Washers (45% unreliable) — The outside of your home deserves a quality clean just as well as the inside. Unfortunately, buying this online might not lead you to the best possible washer.
    • Reliable Alternative: Westinghouse Electric Pressure Washer
    • Review Grade: A 
    • Review highlight: “Super easy to assemble, user manual included, easy to use with excellent power to do any job!” 
  • Stick Vacuums & Electric Brooms (51% unreliable) — A dupe might look tempting, but with reviews this sketchy, you might just be sweeping your money away.
    • Reliable Alternative: Dyson Cordless Vacuum 
    • Review Grade: A
    • Review highlight: “From the moment I took it out of the box, it was clear that this vacuum was built well.” 
  • Handheld Vacuums (43% unreliable) — Turns out, the smaller the vacuum, the bigger the review problem.
    • Reliable Alternative: Black & Decker Dustbuster Handheld Vacuum
    • Review Grade: A
    • Review highlight: “The pivoting nozzle is extendable to get into nooks and crannies, able to lock into the position needed.” 
  • Personal Fans (45% unreliable) — Want a breeze? Don’t let unreliable reviews blow you off course.
    • Reliable Alternative: Vornado Mid Size Room Fan 
    • Review Grade: A
    • Review highlight: “If you want a quality fan that doesn’t rattle, doesn’t have a high pitched whine, and moves air without sounding like a boeing 737 on takeoff, this is the fan for you.” 
  • Electric Space Heaters (43% unreliable) — When it comes to heating, reliability is everything—too bad the reviews don’t measure up.

How Fakespot helps you shop smarter

Fakespot’s free browser extension cuts through the noise of misleading reviews, helping you make smarter purchasing decisions. The Review Grade system works on an A-F scale:

  • A & B: Reliable reviews
  • C: Mixed reliability, approach with caution
  • D & F: Unreliable, buyer beware

Before you stock up on seasonal necessities, download Fakespot on Firefox, Chrome, or Safari to shop with confidence. Make informed choices and keep your home refresh hassle-free!

The post Spring cleaning? Watch out for these product categories while online shopping appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

The Mozilla Blog — Nolen Royalty, known as eieio, keeps the internet fun with experimental multiplayer games

Nolen Royalty, who's behind eieio games, smiling in front of water with gaming and heart icons on a pixel grid background.<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Nolen Royalty is a game developer and software engineer who makes experimental massively multiplayer games and elaborate technical jokes at eieio.games. </figcaption>

Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn’t perfect, but we know the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for human connection, and lets everyone find where they belong — their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can’t get enough of, the sites and forums that shaped them, and how they would design their own corner of the web.

We caught up with Nolen Royalty, known as eieio, the creator of experimental multiplayer games like One Million Checkboxes and Stranger Video. He talks about the forums that shaped him, the deep dives he can’t get enough of, and why he still believes in an internet made for fun.

What is your favorite corner of the internet? 

Fun question!

Growing up, I spent a *ton* of time on internet forums for different games. I moved a lot as a kid and forums were a fun way to stay in touch with a consistent group of people as I moved. I was on too many forums to list, but I spent the most time on this site called TeamLiquid that was (at the time) a place where people gathered to talk about the Korean professional Starcraft scene. I spent over a decade regularly posting on TeamLiquid and have a bunch of real-life friends that I met via the site. I miss forums!!

These days my favorite corners are a couple of smaller chats for some communities that I’m involved in. I spend a lot of time in the Zulip (open-source Slack) for the Recurse Center (a writer’s retreat for programmers) and in some smaller chats with other friends that do creative internet tech stuff. It’s really really nice to have a place to share your work without the incentives of social media.

What is an internet deep dive that you can’t wait to jump back into?

One of my favorite things is when I find a new internet writer whose work I enjoy – especially if they’ve been at it for a while. I looove going through the entire archive of a new (to me) blog.

I think my most recent blog binge was Adrian Hon’s excellent games blog (mssv.net). But I’m always on the lookout for new writers!

What is the one tab you always regret closing?

Ooh I normally think about the tabs that I regret opening!

I think my biggest regular regret here is when I find a new tech-internet-artist person and close out their site without remembering to bookmark it 🙁

What can you not stop talking about on the internet right now?

I probably don’t *talk* about this on the internet as much as I should, but one thing I constantly think about is how social media has warped our understanding of what exists on the internet.

Sometimes when I make a game people tell me that it reminds them of “the old internet.” When they say this I think that they basically mean that I’ve made something fun and unmonetized largely for the joy of…making something fun. And because there’s a whole professional social media ecosystem that didn’t exist 20 years ago, it can feel like there are fewer people doing that now.

But I don’t think that’s true! There is SO much cool stuff out there on the internet – I think there’s way more than when I was a kid! It’s just that there’s way more stuff *period* on the internet these days. Going on the internet is much more a part of participating in society than it was in the 2000s, and so you have to search a little more for the good stuff.

But it’s out there!

What was the first online community you engaged with?

Definitely internet forums! I *think* the first forum I joined was either for fans of the site Homestar Runner or for this game I was really into called Kingdom of Loathing. This was ~20 years ago (!) so I would have been 12 or 13 at the time. I really miss pre-social media niche communities; there’s a totally different to making a whole account somewhere *just* to talk about your niche interest vs surfing between a million different niches on a big social platform.

If you could create your own corner of the internet, what would it look like?

In a lot of ways I feel like I already have this! I have my small communities (the Recurse Center, my little friend groups) where folks create and share cool work. And I have my site, where I build and write about fun things. And I love all of that.

But if I could wave a magic wand and change the internet or create something new, I’d think about how to create a social media site with better incentives. That is, I think most platforms encourage you to think in terms of likes or views when sharing your work. But in my experience those metrics aren’t always aligned with making “good” work — they’re often aligned with making work that is easy to share or to understand. And I think that affects the type of work people share on those platforms in big and small ways.

I care about this a lot because when I make a massively multiplayer website – which is my favorite thing to do – I *need* a bunch of players. A website like One Million Checkboxes doesn’t work if it’s just me. And the only way that I know how to find a massive player base is with social media.

What articles and/or videos are you waiting to read/watch right now?

After an eight-year hiatus one of my favorite things on the internet – the youtube channel Every Frame a Painting – has uploaded new videos! I got to see their first new video live at XOXO last year but I’ve been saving their remaining videos for the right moment – maybe a time where I need a little inspiration or a push to aim higher and create something beautiful. Although after writing this out maybe I’ll just go watch them right now…

How does making games for the 2000s internet shape the way you think about the future of creativity online?

I got at this a little above, but I think when people talk about “the old internet” they’re mostly talking about things that are personal, small, and created for the fun of it.

I think it’s getting easier to make stuff for the internet every year. And that’s great! So I *hope* that we see more and more people making stuff that feels like it belongs to the old internet (even if it’s using technology that wasn’t available to us back then).

For myself — I think these days I can really tell whether I’m making something for myself or whether I’m making something because I think it’s what other people want. And I try to push myself to stick to the former. It’s more fun that way.

Nolen Royalty is a game developer and software engineer who makes experimental massively multiplayer games and elaborate technical jokes at eieio.games. He’s interested in getting strangers to interact in fun ways over the internet (e.g. One Million Checkboxes, Stranger Video) and running games in surprising places (e.g. playing pong inside his unclosed browser tabs). He lives in Brooklyn and is determined to keep the internet fun.

The post Nolen Royalty, known as eieio, keeps the internet fun with experimental multiplayer games appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Firefox UX — Marshmallows are for team players — A light-hearted, Severance-inspired icebreaker your team will…

Marshmallows are for team players — A light-hearted, Severance-inspired icebreaker

Let’s be real — most icebreakers are cringe with a capital C. But instead of pretending we’re above it, what if we just… leaned into the weird? That’s my plan for our upcoming workweek.
Severance just wrapped (what a finale, am I right?!), and the vibe is spot-on: relevant, bizarre in the best way, and blessedly spoiler-free. So I channeled my inner Milchick, grabbed some marshmallows, and cooked up something that might just be weird enough to stand out from the usual “ugh, another icebreaker” routine.

Here’s how to run your own “Marshmallows Are for Team Players” session:

Two people dressed in matching white winter outfits stand in a dark setting lit dramatically from below. The person on the left holds a tray of neatly arranged marshmallows, looking toward the person on the right, who stares straight ahead with a serious expression. The scene evokes a cult-like, ceremonial vibe.<figcaption>Image via Apple TV+</figcaption>

Set the Mood (2 min)

Start with a little corporate dystopia ambiance:

  1. Play the Severance theme music for 10–15 seconds.
  2. Then roll the iconic clip of Milchick saying:
Close-up of a man lit dramatically from below, wearing a white turtleneck and coat, with a serious expression. On-screen subtitle reads: “Marshmallows are for team players, Dylan.” The scene has an eerie, intense tone.<figcaption>“Marshmallows are for team players, Dylan.”</figcaption>
3. With a grin, tell your team:
“That’s right. Marshmallows are for team players.”

Explain the Rules (1 min)

We’ve got marshmallows — but they’re not free.
To earn one, you need to give a shoutout to a teammate who was a great collaborator this week.

It could be anything — big impact, quiet kindness, or someone who brought great vibes to a meeting.

Tell them:
“Try to keep it to one kudos each so we have time for everyone — but if you really need to sneak in an extra one, I won’t stop you.”

The Kudos Round (5–10 min)

Go popcorn style — whoever goes gives kudos, grabs a marshmallow, then calls on the next person.

Each person:

  1. Shares a kudos
  2. Collects a marshmallow
  3. Picks who goes next

Bonus rule:
If someone gives kudos and gets one, they can take two marshmallows. Double win.

The Marshmallow Club Photo (2 min)

Wrap it up with a team pic:

“Grab your marshmallow, hold it up like it’s your Severance badge, and let’s get a group photo. Smile like Milchick!”

Suggested file name:
team_players_in_marshmallow_mode.jpg

Slack Follow-Up

Post the photo with something like:

Behold: the Marshmallow Club
Everyone here earned their marshmallow by lifting someone else up. True team player behavior.
We’ve also unlocked a new emoji: :milchick-approves:
Use it to celebrate kudos, overachievers, or extreme corporate joy.
Praise Kier.

Try It Yourself

All it takes is a playlist, a clip, a bag of marshmallows — and a bit of satire. Give it a go at your next team meeting or offsite. Just don’t forget the group photo. Milchick is watching.

Have your own twist on this idea? Or another ridiculous icebreaker that weirdly worked? Drop it in the comments or DM me — I’m always collecting ideas.

Marshmallows are for team players — A light-hearted, Severance-inspired icebreaker your team will… was originally published in Firefox User Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Mozilla Blog — 4 accessibility tools to try in Firefox

An orange puzzle piece with a black ring or orbit around it, surrounded by icons representing extensions for accessibility, set against a blue-to-purple gradient space-themed background with dotted orbital paths and stars.

The internet is for everyone, but not everyone experiences it the same way. For many of us, harsh brightness, hard-to-read text or a webpage that doesn’t work with a screen reader can turn simple tasks into frustrating obstacles.

While we’ve built accessibility features directly into Firefox, we also support extensions that let you customize your online experience. Accessibility isn’t one size-fits-all and the right tools can make a huge difference, including for folks who are not disabled. 

We’ve put together a list of extensions that address different accessibility challenges. Here are four that our users love: 

1. Dark Reader: Make websites easier on the eyes

A black browser window with white text showing an open Google Doc with the Dark Reader settings panel open for customization.

What it does: Dark Reader applies a dark theme to websites, helping reduce glare and making text easier to read.

Who it helps: People with light sensitivity, vision impairments or anyone who finds bright screens uncomfortable.

Dark Reader is great for reducing eye strain. It increases contrast in a way that works best for the user and better supports browsing when eyes are tired. It’s especially useful for sites like Google Docs, which don’t support dark mode natively. It lets users adjust brightness and contrast to their preference, whether that’s full dark mode, sepia, or an off-white background.

Some sites have dark mode built-in, but not all of them do. Dark Reader helps bridge that gap. It doesn’t solve everything — for example, images remain unchanged — but for text-heavy sites, it’s a great option.

2. Bionic Reader: Partially bolded text for smoother reading

Three paragraphs from a webpage explaining browser extensions, with the first part of every word in bold text.

What it does: Bionic Reader bolds parts of words to help guide the eye while reading.

Who it helps: People with dyslexia, those learning a new language or anyone who struggles with dense text.

Bionic Reader makes text easier to process by bolding parts of words to guide the eye. It’s useful for a range of reading challenges — not just dyslexia but also for people learning a new language and need help parsing words and characters.  

It can be useful for anyone who finds certain fonts difficult to read or just prefers an easier-to-follow text format.

3. Zoom Page WE: Text size that’s just right

What it does: Zoom Page WE allows users to set custom zoom levels, override website restrictions and enforce minimum font sizes.

Who it helps: People with low vision, those who strain to read small text or anyone who prefers larger font sizes.

Many websites prevent users from resizing text, which can make reading difficult for people with low vision. Zoom Page WE overrides those restrictions, allowing for custom zoom levels and minimum font sizes.

Firefox itself has built-in zoom features, but some people prefer the customization options of an extension like this. It allows you  to jump directly to a specific zoom level instead of adjusting incrementally.

4. Read Aloud: Let the web read to you

A text-to-speech tool in a web browser reading The Old Man and the Sea. A pop-up window shows four playback controls at the top, then the book’s title highlighted in yellow, followed by three sentences of text.

What it does: Read Aloud converts text to speech, offering customizable voices, reading speeds, and text highlighting.

Who it helps: People with vision impairments, those who prefer listening to content rather than reading it or anyone who benefits from auditory learning.

Read Aloud makes long articles more manageable by converting them into speech. Firefox has a built-in “narrate” feature in Reader View, but this extension offers more customization, including different voices, reading speeds, and even text highlighting. It’s all about flexibility. 

Accessibility is a work in progress. We’re on it.

We’re always finding new ways to make Firefox more accessible. Right now, we’re working with Fable, a company that connects us with disabled expert users of assistive technology to test and improve features.

The feedback we’re getting from real users is shaping Firefox for the better. We’re committed to building more accessibility features and making sure everyone has the tools they need to browse with ease. If there’s something that would make Firefox work better for you, we’d love to hear about it.

An illustration shows the Firefox logo, a fox curled up in a circle.

Get the browser that puts your privacy first — and always has

Download Firefox

The post 4 accessibility tools to try in Firefox  appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Open Policy & Advocacy — Mozilla shares 2025 Policy Priorities and Recommendations for Creating an Internet Where Everyone Can Thrive

Mozilla envisions a future where the internet is a truly global public resource that is open, accessible, and safe for all. An internet that benefits people using online services, prioritizes the right to privacy, and enables economic dynamism. Our commitment to this vision stems from Mozilla’s foundational belief that the internet was built by people, for people and that its future should not be dictated by a few powerful organizations.

When technology is developed solely for profit, it risks causing real harm to people. True choice and control for Americans can only be achieved through a competitive ecosystem with a range of services and providers that foster innovation. However, today’s internet is far from this ideal state, and without action, is only set to become increasingly consolidated in the age of AI.

Today, Mozilla is setting out our 2025 – 2026 Policy Vision for the United States as we look to a new administration and a new congress. Our policy vision is anchored in our guiding principles for a healthy internet, and outlines policy priorities that we believe should be the ‘north star’ for U.S. policymakers and regulators. Some recommendations are long overdue, while others seek to ensure the development of a healthy and competitive internet moving forward.

Here’s how we can work together to make this happen.

Priority 1: Openness, Competition, and Accountability in AI

Promoting open source policies and approaches in AI has the potential not just to create technology that benefits individuals, but also to make AI systems safer and more transparent. Open approaches and public investment can spur increased research and development, create products that are more accessible and less vulnerable to cyberattacks, and help to catalyze investment, job creation, and a more competitive ecosystem. Mozilla’s key recommendations include:

  • Increase government use of, and support for, open-source AI. The U.S. federal government procures billions of dollars of software every year. The government should use these resources to promote and leverage open source AI when possible, to drive growth and innovation.
  • Develop and fund public AI infrastructure. Supporting initiatives like the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) and the Department of Energy’s FASST program is crucial for developing public AI infrastructure that provides researchers and universities with access to AI tools, fosters innovation and ensures benefits for all.
  • Grow the AI talent ecosystem. It is critical that America invests in education programs to grow the domestic AI talent ecosystem. Without this talent, America will face serious difficulties competing globally.
  • Provide access to AI-related resource consumption data. At its current growth trajectory, AI could end up consuming tremendous amounts of natural resources. The government should work with the AI industry (from semiconductor developers to cloud providers to model deployers) to provide open access to resource consumption data and increase industry transparency; this can help to prevent expensive and dangerous grid failures and could lead to lower energy prices for consumers.
  • Clarify a federal position on open source AI export controls that maintains an open door for innovation. By affirming a federal position on open source AI export controls to reflect those of NTIA, and emphasizing the benefits of open models, the administration can spur further advancement in the field.

Priority 2: Protecting Online Privacy and Ensuring Accountability 

Today’s internet economy is powered by people’s information. While this data can deliver massive innovation and new services, it can also put consumers and trust at risk. Unchecked collection and opaque practices can leave people susceptible to deceptive and invasive practices, and discrimination online.  The rise of generative AI makes the issue of online privacy more urgent than ever.

Mozilla believes that privacy and innovation can coexist. With action and collaboration, policymakers can shift the internet economy toward one that prioritizes users’ rights, transparency, and trust — where privacy is not a privilege but a guarantee for all. We recommend that policymakers:

  • Pass strong comprehensive federal privacy legislation and support state efforts. Congress must enact a sufficiently strong comprehensive federal privacy law that addresses AI-specific privacy protections, upholds data minimization, ensures the security protections that encryption provides, and covers children and adults, setting a high bar for meaningful protections. This is how Congress can create an environment where people can truly benefit from the technologies they rely on without paying the premium of exploitation of their personal data. States should also move to enact strong laws to fill the gap and protect their constituents.
  • Support the adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). This includes funding NIST and the National Science Foundation to advance fundamental and applied research, while establishing strong privacy protections that incentivize companies to prioritize PETs. The global standards development and consensus process is essential for privacy preserving technologies to develop in a sustainable manner, in particular around areas like advertising. Legislation can also incentivize companies to adopt more privacy-preserving business practices, ultimately benefiting users and supporting their right to privacy online.
  • Provide necessary resources and tools to data privacy regulators. Congress and the administration must enable and empower relevant federal regulators by providing additional resources and authorizations to facilitate privacy-related investigations and enforcement. Efforts should, in particular, target data brokers who traffic sensitive data.
  • Support critical independent research. Policymakers should ensure meaningful access to important data from major platforms for academia and civil society, enabling better research into big tech’s harms and stronger accountability. Transparency efforts like the bipartisan Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA) are essential to advancing transparency while protecting public-interest research. Expanding such legislation to include AI platforms and model providers is critical to addressing privacy-related harms and ensuring accountability in the evolving digital landscape.
  • Respect browser opt-out signals. We encourage lawmakers at the state and federal level to support key privacy tools, like the Global Privacy Control (GPC) that Firefox uses. Mozilla supports bills like California’s AB 566, which would require browsers and mobile operating systems to include an opt-out setting. We encourage lawmakers at the state and federal level to advance this key privacy tool in law and meet the expectations that consumers rightly have about treatment of their personal information.

Priority 3: Increasing Choice for Consumers

Real choice and control for consumers require an open, fair, and competitive ecosystem where diverse services and providers can thrive.

Updated competition laws – and an understanding of the importance of competition at every layer of the ecosystem – are essential for the internet to be private, secure, interoperable, open, transparent, and to balance commercial profit with public benefit. Mozilla is committed to this future. To achieve this, we must advance the below.

  • Update antitrust legislation to address anti-competitive business practices, such as harmful self-preferencing, that stymie innovation and limit consumer choice. Congress must pass antitrust legislation that addresses these practices and provides the necessary resources, expertise, and authority to relevant regulatory agencies.
  • Tackle harmful design practices. Harmful deceptive design practices not only manifest at the interface level, but also deeper at the operating system level – particularly in cases of vertical integration of services and features. Deploying manipulative, coercive, and deceptive tactics such as aggressive and misleading prompts, messages, and pop-ups risk overriding user choice entirely. Policymakers must hold bad actors accountable.
  • Foster competition across the ecosystem. Independent browser and browser engine developers, like Mozilla, have a long history of innovating and offering privacy- and security-conscious users a meaningful alternative to big tech browser engines. Policymakers should recognize the importance of independent browsers and browser engines in maintaining a safe, open, and interoperable web that provides meaningful choice.

So what is the path forward?

We see our vision as a roadmap to a healthier internet. We recognize that achieving this vision means engaging with legislators, regulators, and the wider policy community. Mozilla remains committed to our mission to ensure the internet is a space for innovation, transparency, and openness for all.

Read our Vision for the United States: 2025 – 2026 for a more comprehensive look at our priorities and recommendations to protect the future of the internet. 

The post Mozilla shares 2025 Policy Priorities and Recommendations for Creating an Internet Where Everyone Can Thrive appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

Wednesday, 26 March 2025

The Mozilla Blog — A smarter VPN experience: Introducing the Mozilla VPN extension for Windows

Browser window connected by a dotted line to a puzzle piece icon.

VPNs are great for keeping your connection secure and your activity private, but they can also get in the way. From triggering captchas to making some websites harder to access, traditional VPNs often force users into a trade-off between privacy and convenience. The new Mozilla VPN extension for Firefox — now available on Windows — gives users more control and keeps you protected without the hassle.

We get it — VPNs can be frustrating 

I’m the product manager for Mozilla VPN, and I know firsthand how important — and frustrating — a VPN can be.

One of my biggest frustrations with VPNs is their rigid, all-or-nothing approach. Many websites — whether news platforms, social media, banking services or streaming sites — often misinterpret VPN traffic as suspicious. This can lead to access restrictions, additional authentication steps, or slowdowns. What’s worse, too often I’ve disabled my VPN just to visit a specific site, only to realize later that I failed to turn it back on.

I also spend a lot of time online keeping up with world events, and a VPN doesn’t just protect my privacy — it also helps me gain a local perspective by letting me experience the web as if I were browsing from different locations. Sometimes I want to access content as if I were in my home country; other times, I need locally relevant information from my current location. Unfortunately, traditional VPNs apply a blanket location setting to all traffic, making it cumbersome to switch between vantage points.

The Mozilla VPN extension for Firefox makes it easy

Through conversations with our users, we discovered that frustrations with VPNs were widespread. In fact, difficulty accessing specific sites was one of the top reasons people abandoned VPNs 🤯. With that in mind, we developed the Mozilla VPN extension for Windows, built in collaboration with Firefox, to offer a more adaptable, flexible, and secure browsing experience.

Here’s what it does:

1. Choose which websites bypass VPN

The new extension lets you select websites that don’t use VPN protection, helping you avoid captchas and other access issues without turning off your VPN entirely. Once set, your preferences stay in place — no need to adjust them each time.

What this means for you: No more toggling your VPN on and off just to access certain sites. A clear indicator in the URL bar shows when a site isn’t using VPN protection, making it easy to turn it back on if needed.

2. Set different VPN locations per site

Assign different VPN locations to different websites. Browse one site as if you’re in the U.S. while accessing another as if you’re in Paris — all in the same Firefox session.

What this means for you: Whether you’re checking region-specific content, local news, or work resources, this feature gives you precise control without affecting your entire connection.

One of our biggest takeaways from speaking with users: People don’t just want security — they want control. Traditional VPNs force users to apply the same settings across all websites, but real-world browsing isn’t that simple. Our goal is to make privacy tools more practical — so you can stay secure without the usual trade-offs.

More improvements and access to come

We’re actively improving the extension, focusing on stability, reliability and performance. Plus, we know that many macOS and Linux users are eager for this functionality too — we hear you! Stay tuned, as we’re working to bring these features to more platforms soon.

Your feedback matters

If you’re on Windows, install the Mozilla VPN Extension for Firefox to experience a more flexible VPN firsthand. And please let us know what you think! You can reach us on Mozilla Connect and, if you are an extension user, we’ve added a “Give Feedback” link directly there, making it easy for you to share your thoughts. Your input helps us refine the experience and make Mozilla VPN even better for everyone.

Thank you for choosing Mozilla VPN, and happy (safe) browsing!

A smarter VPN experience

Try the Mozilla VPN extension for Windows

The post A smarter VPN experience: Introducing the Mozilla VPN extension for Windows appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Tuesday, 25 March 2025

hacks.mozilla.org — Improving Firefox Stability in the Enterprise by Reducing DLL Injection

Beginning in version 138, Firefox will offer an alternative to DLL injection for Data Loss Prevention (DLP) deployments in enterprise environments.

DLL Injection

DLL injection into Firefox is a topic we’ve covered on the Hacks blog before. In 2023, we blogged about the Firefox capability to let users block third-party DLLs from being loaded. We explained what DLL injection is, how we deal with problematic third-party modules, our about:third-party page, and our third-party injection policy. Earlier, in 2019, we released a study of DLL injection Firefox bugs in collaboration with Polytechnique Montréal. We return to this topic now, in the context of enterprise Firefox installations.

First, a reminder of what DLL injection is and why it continues to be problematic. DLL injection is the term we use to describe third-party Windows software injecting its own DLL module code into Firefox. Third parties develop DLLs for injecting into applications to extend their functionality in some way. This is prevalent in the Windows ecosystem. When third-party code is injected, the injected code interacts with the internals of the application. While it is not unusual for software to work together, and the internet is built on software interoperating over documented standards, DLL injection differs in that the undocumented internals of an application are not intended to be a stable interface. As such, they are a poor foundation to build software products on. When the underlying application is changed, it can result in incompatibilities, leading to crashes or other unexpected behavior. In a modern web browser like Firefox, new features and fixes, big and small, are developed and released on a monthly schedule. Normal browser development can therefore cause incompatibilities with injected software, resulting in Firefox crashes, bypassing of security features, or other unpredictable buggy behavior. When these problems arise, they require emergency troubleshooting and engineering of workarounds for users until the problems are addressed by software updates. This often requires collaboration between the browser and the third-party application’s developers. The type of software injected into Firefox varies from small open source projects to widely-deployed enterprise security products. In an attempt to eliminate some of the most difficult DLL injection issues, we’ve turned our attention to Data Loss Prevention enterprise applications.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in the Enterprise

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) products are a type of software that is widely deployed by organizations to prevent unintended leaks of private data. Examples of private data include customer records such as names, addresses, credit card information or company secrets. Much like how anti-virus software is deployed across a corporation’s fleet of laptops, so too is DLP software. These deployments have become increasingly common, in large part due to compliance and liability concerns.

How does this relate to Firefox? DLP software typically uses DLL injection to monitor applications such as Firefox for activity that might leak private data. This only applies to specific operations that can leak sensitive information such as file uploads, pasting (as in copy-and-paste), drag-and-drop, and printing.

DLP and Firefox Today

Today, DLP software typically monitors Firefox activity via DLL injection as described above. Firefox and web browsers are not unique in this respect, but they are heavily used and under constant development, making DLL injection more dangerous. DLP software is typically deployed to a fleet of corporate computers that are managed by an IT department. This includes deployment of the software that injects into applications. DLP vendors take efforts to ensure that their products are compatible with the latest version of Firefox by testing beta versions and updating their DLLs as needed, but problems still occur regularly. A common issue is that a problem is encountered by corporate users who report the problem to their IT department. Their IT staff then work to debug the problem. They may file a bug report with Firefox or the DLP vendor. When a Firefox bug is filed, it can be a challenge for Mozilla to determine that the bug was actually caused by external software. When we learn of such problems, we alert the vendor and investigate workarounds. In the interim, users have a poor experience and may have to work around problems or even use another browser. When the browser is not functional, the problem becomes a high severity incident where support teams work as quickly as possible to help restore functionality.

Browsing Privacy

When users browse on company-owned computers, their browsing privacy is often subject to corporate-mandated software. Different regions have different laws about this and the disclosures required, but on a technical level, when the device is controlled by a corporation, that corporation has a number of avenues at its disposal for monitoring activity at whatever level is dictated by corporate policy. Firefox is built on the principle that browsing activity belongs only to the user, but as an application, it cannot reasonably override the wishes of the device administrator. Insofar as that administrator has chosen to deploy DLP software, they will expect it to work with the other software on the device. If a well-supported mechanism is not available, they will either turn to opaque and error-prone methods like DLL injection, or replace Firefox with another browser.

What’s New – Reducing DLL Injection in the Enterprise

Starting with Firefox 138, DLP software can work with Firefox without the use of DLL injection. Firefox 138 integrates the Content Analysis SDK and it can be enabled with Enterprise Policies. The SDK, developed by Google and used in Chrome Enterprise, is a lightweight protocol between the browser and a DLP agent, with the implementation being browser-specific. In other words, Firefox has its own implementation of the protocol. The integration allows Firefox to interact with DLP software while reducing the injection of third-party code. This will improve the stability for Firefox users in the enterprise and, as more DLP vendors adopt the SDK, there will be less third-party code injected into Firefox. With vendors and browsers using the same SDK, vendors can know that a single DLP agent implementation will be compatible with multiple browsers. During development of the Firefox implementation, we’ve been working with some leading DLP vendors to ensure compatibility. In addition to stability, Firefox will display an indicator when the DLP SDK is used, providing more transparency for users.

For Enterprise Use

Firefox will only enable the Content Analysis SDK in configurations where a Firefox Enterprise Policy is used. Firefox Enterprise Policies are used by organizations to configure Firefox settings across a fleet of computers. They allow administrators to configure Firefox, for example, to limit which browser extensions can be installed, set security-related browser settings, configure network proxy settings, and more. You can learn more about Firefox Enterprise Policies on our support article Enforce policies on Firefox for Enterprise.

The post Improving Firefox Stability in the Enterprise by Reducing DLL Injection appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog.

The Mozilla Blog — Open-source AI is hard. Blueprints can help!

Screenshot of a developer platform called Blueprints, showing open-source AI workflow examples like turning documents into podcasts and fine-tuning language models. Main tagline reads “Stop Searching, Start Building.”

“I spend 8 hours per week trying to keep up to date, it’s overwhelming!”

“Integrating new libraries is difficult. They’re either poorly maintained or updated in ways that break compatibility.”

“I want to be able to experiment quickly, without relying on APIs for closed-source models.”

These were just a few of the challenges we heard from developers during months of interviews. Today, we’re excited to introduce Blueprints and the Blueprints Hub!

Meet Mozilla.ai Blueprints

The Blueprints Hub is designed to cut through the clutter of clunky tool integration and outdated resources, so you can focus on building, not troubleshooting. It’s a showcase for the best of the open-source builder community.

What are Blueprints?

Blueprints are your go-to, customizable workflows that enable you to prototype AI applications with trusted open-source tools. Each Blueprint tackles a real-world challenge, giving you a robust foundation to work from:

  • Open-source power: Fully hosted on GitHub and built with the community.
  • Ready out-of-the-box: Get started instantly with accessible setup options.
  • Customizable and extendable: Use it as-is or extend it to fit your own needs.
  • Consistent and templatized: Every Blueprint follows a core template to keep your workflow smooth.
  • Community-driven: Contribute, collaborate, and be part of something bigger.

Our launch lineup
Kick off your journey with these five practical Blueprints:

Explore the Blueprints Hub

Our new Hub is built for ease and exploration:

  • Instant demos: Play around with Blueprints live in the hosted demo. No installation required.
  • Video walkthroughs: Follow our video guides for a step-by-step introduction
  • Technical insights: Understand the technical choices made during development of each Blueprint
  • Practical use-cases: See how other developers are customizing and extending these Blueprints for their needs.
  • Join our community: Share your blueprints, learn from fellow innovators, and help expand the hub.

Ready to transform your AI projects?

Join us and see how Mozilla.ai Blueprints Hub can speed up your development and spark your creativity. Visit our website now to explore, experiment, and become part of our vibrant community. Your next great idea is just a click away! 

Logo with a geometric heart-shaped cube above the word "Blueprints" in bold text.

Ready to transform your AI projects?

Explore the Blueprints Hub

The post Open-source AI is hard. Blueprints can help! appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Monday, 24 March 2025

Open Policy & Advocacy — Mozilla Respond to the White House’s RFI on AI

The Future of AI Must Be Open, Competitive, and Accountable

The internet has always thrived on openness, access, and broad participation. But as we enter the AI era, these core principles are at risk. A handful of dominant tech companies are positioned to control major AI systems, threatening both competition and innovation. At Mozilla, we believe AI should serve the public interest—not just corporate bottom lines.

Earlier this month, we responded to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s request for input on AI policy, where we offered a roadmap for a more open and trustworthy AI future (view Mozilla’s full submission here). Here’s what we think should happen.

1. AI Policy Must Prioritize Openness, Competition, and Accountability

Right now, too much AI development stays behind closed doors. Proprietary models dominate, creating a landscape where users and developers have little insight—or control—over the AI systems shaping our digital lives. If we want AI that benefits everyone, we need strong policies that promote:

  • Openness: Encouraging open-source AI development ensures transparency, security, and accessibility.
  • Competition: Preventing monopolistic control keeps AI innovation dynamic and diverse.
  • Accountability: Effective governance can mitigate AI’s risks while fostering responsible development.

By advancing these principles, we can build an AI ecosystem that empowers users rather than locking them into closed, corporate-controlled systems.

2. The Government Should Support Public AI Infrastructure

AI’s future shouldn’t be dictated solely by private companies. Public investment is key to ensuring broad access to AI tools and research. We support initiatives like the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), which would provide universities, researchers, and small businesses with AI computing power and resources. We hope to see federal, state, and local governments increasingly adopt open source AI models in their workflows, which can help save taxpayers money, increase efficiency, and prevent vendor lock-in. Public AI infrastructure levels the playing field, allowing more voices to shape AI’s future and facilitating innovation across America, not just in a few tech hubs.

3. Open-Source AI Should Be Encouraged, Not Restricted

Discussions about restricting open-source AI through export controls often miss the point about how to ensure national leadership in AI. Open-source AI fosters innovation, improves security, and lowers costs—critical benefits for businesses, researchers, and everyday users around the world. For the United States, promoting open source AI means more global products would be built on top of American AI innovation.

A 2025 McKinsey report, “Open source in the age of AI,” created in collaboration with Mozilla, found that 60% of decision-makers reported lower implementation costs with open-source AI compared to proprietary tools. Restricting open models would stifle progress and put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage. Instead, we urge policymakers to support the open-source AI ecosystem and resist governance approaches that restrict AI models overall rather than making more targeted and precise interventions for AI harms.

4. AI Energy Consumption Needs Transparency

AI systems consume enormous amounts of energy, and this demand is only growing. To prevent AI from straining our power grids and driving up costs, we need better transparency into AI’s resource consumption so that we can plan infrastructure development more effectively. The federal government should work with the industry to collect and share data on AI energy use. By understanding AI’s impact on infrastructure, we can promote sustainable innovation.

5. The U.S. Must Invest in AI Talent Development

AI leadership isn’t just about technology—it’s about people. To remain competitive, the U.S. needs a strong, diverse workforce of AI researchers and practitioners. That means investing in:

  • Community colleges and public universities to train the next generation of AI professionals.
  • Apprenticeship and retraining programs to help workers adapt to AI-driven industries and adopt AI in every type of business across the economy from manufacturing to retail.
  • Public-private partnerships that create novel education pathways for students, like Dakota State University’s collaboration with ArmyCyber.

By growing the AI talent ecosystem, we ensure that AI works for people—not the other way around.

The Path Forward

AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time. But without strong policies, it risks becoming yet another tool for big tech consolidation and unchecked corporate power.

At Mozilla, we believe in an AI future that is open, competitive, and accountable. We call on policymakers to take bold steps—supporting open-source AI, investing in public infrastructure, and fostering fair competition—to ensure AI works for everyone.

The post Mozilla Respond to the White House’s RFI on AI appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

Thursday, 20 March 2025

The Mozilla Blog — Reaching readers, one TikTok at a time

Three screenshots of a creator discussing essay topics and subtle status symbols, with captions like "Bad Essay Topics Rich Kid Edition," "Signs of Privilege in NYC," and "8 Stealth Privilege Status Symbols."<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Sanibel Lazar is using TikTok to break beyond traditional book promotion. </figcaption>

Spoiler: The internet’s not finished. Welcome to “Web in Progress,” a series celebrating the internet as a space you can shape, not just scroll through. Just as Firefox empowers you to take charge of your online experience, this series highlights how individuals and communities are shaping an internet that truly serves their needs.

In this installment, see how a debut novelist is using TikTok to break beyond traditional book promotion. By focusing on niche interests, she found new ways to connect with readers who might never have picked up her book. Her experience is a testament to how digital platforms can open unexpected doors. 

Before I started promoting my debut novel, “To Have and Have More,” I hadn’t posted on any social media platform since 2015. Creating content wasn’t in my plan — until I realized it was the most practical way to get my book noticed. Working with a brand-new press meant I had to carve out my own opportunities. Social media was a means to feel like I was in the driver’s seat as my book went out into the world. 

Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the need to promote my book, I leaned into what I could control. I started creating videos on TikTok, not as part of BookTok, but tailored to themes from my book like class, privilege and wealth. They led me to unexpected audiences. I’ve ended up on PrivilegeTok, WealthTok, StatusSymbolTok and even QuietLuxuryTok — places where I stand out as the only person talking about a novel. My videos are a way to access audiences who might not otherwise pick up a book.

When one of my videos hit a couple hundred thousand views, I checked my Amazon ranking and watched my book climb. Social media has also brought me opportunities I didn’t anticipate. Rather than chasing podcast invites or op-eds, I’ve been getting invitations to do readings and guest spots (it’s thanks to social media that I got tapped to write this article) — all because people discovered me through my content. 

"To Have and Have More: A Novel" by Sanibel, featuring a golden, glittering artichoke on a lavender background. Includes a review quote praising the book's insightful exploration of wealth, friendship, and racism.

I’m not on TikTok to recommend books or talk about author life; instead I riff on social etiquette, classism, and luxury brands. My strategy isn’t about jumping on trend bandwagons but about getting people interested in my book. I call this approach “Oblique Content,” inspired by perfume ads that sell a mood or idea rather than focusing on product specs. In my videos, I talk about everything from toxic wealth to throwback millennial fashion trends — and I plug my book for ten seconds at the end.

I got a DM recently from a follower who said she was shocked to see a certain high-end brand at TJMaxx and thought of me. That message was a small but significant sign: My content was resonating. People were connecting my name and voice with the themes of my book.

For creatives, finding success on social media isn’t as simple as racking up views. You want your followers to be interested in your body of work and your ideas — not just your ability to “stop the scroll.” My advice? Experiment widely and don’t pigeonhole yourself in the conventions of your genre. And don’t get sidetracked scrolling for inspiration; focus on creating. 

Sanibel Lazar is a writer based in New York City. She earned her MFA from The New School and her BA in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her debut novel, “To Have and Have More,” will be published in April 2025. Sanibel’s work has appeared in New York Magazine, ELLE, Air Mail, Literary Hub and more.

The post Reaching readers, one TikTok at a time appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Thursday, 13 March 2025

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — VIDEO: The Thunderbird Design System

In this month’s Community Office Hours, Laurel Terlesky, Design Manager, is talking about the new Thunderbird Design System. In her talk from FOSDEM, “Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable, Open-Source Design System,” Laurel describes the Thunderbird design journey. If you are interested in how the desktop and mobile apps have gotten their new look, or in the open source design process (and how to take part), this talk is for you!

Next month, we’ll be chatting with Vineet Deo, a Software Engineer on the Desktop team who will walk us through the new Account Hub on the Desktop app. If you want a sneak peak at this new streamlined experience, you can find it in the Daily channel now and the Beta channel starting March 25.

February Office Hours: The Thunderbird Design System

As Thunderbird has grown over the past few years, so has its design needs. The most recent 115 and 128 releases, Supernova and Nebula, have introduced a more modern, streamlined look to the Thunderbird desktop application. Likewise, the Thunderbird for Android app has incorporated Material 3 in its development from the K-9 Mail app. When we begin working on the iOS app, we’ll need to work with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. Thus, Laurel and her team have built a design system that provides consistency across our existing and future products. This system’s underlying principles also embrace user choice and privacy while emphasizing human collaboration and high design standards.

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

We’re so grateful to Laurel for joining us! We hope this video helps explain more about how we design our Thunderbird products. Want to know more about this new Thunderbird design system? Want to find out how to contribute to the design process? Watch the video and check out our resources below!

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Thunderbird Design Resources:

The post VIDEO: The Thunderbird Design System appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Wednesday, 12 March 2025

Web Application Security — Enhancing CA Practices: Key Updates in Mozilla Root Store Policy, v3.0

Mozilla remains committed to fostering a secure, agile, and transparent Web PKI ecosystem. The new Mozilla Root Store Policy (MRSP) v3.0, effective March 15, 2025, introduces critical updates to strengthen Certificate Authority (CA) practices and enhance compliance.

A major focus of MRSP v3.0 is tackling the long-standing challenge of delayed certificate revocation—an issue that has historically weakened the security and reliability of TLS certificate management. The updated policy establishes clearer revocation expectations, improved incident reporting, subscriber education by CAs, revocation planning, and automated certificate issuance to ensure that certificate replacement and revocation can be handled promptly and at scale.

Beyond improving revocation, MRSP v3.0 also introduces policies to move CA operators toward dedicated hierarchies for TLS and S/MIME certificates and to enhance CA private key security with improved lifecycle tracking. All of these updates raise the bar for CA operations, reinforcing security and trust across the broader internet ecosystem.

Addressing Delayed Certificate Revocation

One of the most persistent challenges in certificate management has been ensuring that TLS server certificates are revoked quickly when necessary. Many website operators struggle to replace certificates efficiently, while security advocates emphasize the need for rapid revocation and automated certificate lifecycle management to reduce risks.

To strike the right balance between security, stability, and operational feasibility, MRSP v3.0 introduces several key changes towards clearer and more comprehensive revocation expectations.

No Exceptions to Revocation Requirements

Previously, some CA operators expressed uncertainty about whether Mozilla could grant exceptions to revocation timelines in certain situations. MRSP v3.0 explicitly reiterates that Mozilla does not grant exceptions to the TLS Baseline Requirements for revocation. This will promote more consistent enforcement of revocation policy.

Stronger Subscriber Communication and Contractual Clarity

CA operators must proactively warn subscribers about the risks of relying on publicly trusted certificates in environments that cannot tolerate timely revocation. Additionally, Subscriber Agreements must explicitly require cooperation with revocation timelines, ensuring CA operators can act without unnecessary delays.

Mass Revocation Preparedness

Historically, large-scale certificate revocations have been challenging, leading to operational slowdowns, and ecosystem-wide risks when urgent action is required. To prevent revocation delays, MRSP v3.0 mandates mass revocation readiness to help ensure that CA operators proactively plan for such scenarios. CA operators will be required to develop, maintain, and test comprehensive plans to revoke large numbers of certificates quickly when necessary. And, to further strengthen mass revocation preparedness, MRSP v3.0 introduces a third-party assessment requirement. Assessors will verify that CA operators:

  • Maintain well-documented, actionable plans for large-scale revocation,
  • Demonstrate feasibility through regular testing, and
  • Continuously improve their approach based on lessons learned.

These measures ensure CA operators are fully prepared for high-impact security events.

By strengthening mass revocation preparedness–and investing in CRLite–Mozilla is working to make certificate revocation a reliable security control.

Enhancing Automation in Certificate Issuance and Renewal

Automation plays a critical role in ensuring certificates can be replaced in a timely manner. To further encourage adoption of automation, MRSP v3.0 introduces new requirements for CA operators seeking root inclusion with the “websites” trust bit enabled, including: offering automation options for Domain Control Validation (DCV), certificate issuance, and renewal (demonstrated by a publicly accessible test website demonstrating automated certificate replacement at least every 30 days). Test website details must be disclosed in the Common CA Database (CCADB), adding transparency to this requirement. This push for more automation aligns with industry best practices, reducing reliance on manual processes, improving security, and minimizing mismanagement risks.

Phasing Out Dual-Purpose (TLS and S/MIME) Root CAs 

A significant change introduced in MRSP v3.0 is the phase-out of dual-purpose root CAs—those with both the “websites” trust bit and the “email” trust bit enabled. The industry is already moving toward separating TLS and S/MIME hierarchies due to their distinct security needs. Keeping these uses separate at the root certificate level ensures more focused compliance, increases CA agility, reduces complexity, and enhances security.  Going forward, Mozilla’s Root Store will require that new root CA certificates are dedicated to either TLS or S/MIME, and CA operators with existing dual-purpose roots will need to submit a transition plan to Mozilla by April 15, 2026, and complete a full migration to separate roots by December 31, 2028. This move enhances clarity and security by ensuring TLS and S/MIME compliance requirements remain distinct and enforceable.

Strengthening CA Key Security with “Cradle-to-Grave” Monitoring

Another major enhancement in MRSP v3.0 is the introduction of stricter key lifecycle monitoring to protect “parked” CA private keys. A “parked” key is a private key that the CA operator has generated for future use, but not yet used in a CA certificate. MRSP v3.0 adds mandatory reporting of parked key public hashes (corresponding to the parked CA private key) in annual audits. By enforcing transparency and accountability, Mozilla strengthens protections against undetected key compromise or misuse.

Conclusion

MRSP v3.0 represents a major step forward in ensuring stronger CA accountability with more reliable certificate revocation processes, better automation and operational resilience, and enhanced security for CA private keys. In all, these changes help modernize the Web PKI and ensure that CA operations will remain transparent, accountable, and secure.  We encourage you to engage with the Mozilla community and to contribute to these efforts and our shared mission of ensuring a secure and trustworthy online experience for all users.

The post Enhancing CA Practices: Key Updates in Mozilla Root Store Policy, v3.0 appeared first on Mozilla Security Blog.

Tuesday, 11 March 2025

The Mozilla Blog — Misinformation in the age of AI: It’s in the details (like extra fingers)

Illustration of a hand with numbered fingers, red flags, an AI speech bubble, and a cursor clicking a sparkling icon, symbolizing AI red flags and detection.

As you scroll through social media, the posts blend together: a heroic cat, a shocking statistic, a breaking news clip. But in a world where AI blurs the line between fact and fiction, how do you tell what’s real from what’s misinformation? 

The short answer: Most of the time, you can’t. Generative AI tools have made it faster, cheaper, and easier to create convincing fakes, flooding our feeds with AI-generated content. But here’s what you can do – learn to spot the signs of misinformation.

What should I think about when trying to detect AI? 

Just looking out for obvious AI will mean missing a lot of it. Retrain your brain to assess social media on a framework similar to the ones used by AI-misinformation researchers. Consider who’s behind the post, whether the content makes sense, how it’s written, the emotions it evokes and any signs of manipulation.   

User 

  • Who is posting this? Is it a reliable source? Is this account tied to a real-world institution that I trust? 
  • What is the username length? Is it a long set of random numbers and letters? Is it a verified account? Does it only have a handful of followers (who also look random or not real)? 

Content 

  • Does the framing make sense? What is this content about? Is it especially vague or seems so outrageous that it couldn’t be true? Does this contradict what you already know about the topic? 
  • Are there platform flags that the content could be potentially misleading, or a comment section full of claims that it’s false? Are there AI badges or indicator hashtags such as #AI, #satire, #skit, #spoof or #AD? 

Style 

  • How is it written? Is there poor or wooden-sounding grammar? Is it flowery? Is there unnatural repetition, or has the user posted the same thing several times?   
  • Does it repeat often-used AI words such as “elevate,” “captivate,” “tapestry” or “delve”? Does it use known AI phrases such as “provided valuable insights,” an “indelible mark,” or “a rich tapestry”? (Of course, these words and phrases don’t definitively mean that the content is AI-generated misinformation; they’re just reasons to take a closer look.)

Emotion 

  • Is this an especially emotion-laded post? Is the level of emotion appropriate for the situation? 
  • Does the post appear to “weaponize” emotion or tell readers how to feel about the content, such as by using more anger and swear words? (Keep in mind that bots on social media can and do use profanity). 

Manipulation 

  • What might someone have to gain by touching on your emotions in this way? What’s the worst-case scenario if this turns out to not be true? What might a user (using AI) be hoping you don’t look up? 

How do I spot AI-generated images or videos online? 

Gone are the days where every AI image looked like a wacky Pixar knockoff, but it’s still worth checking for these known cues: 

How do I verify if something is AI or not? 

Tools like TrueMedia.org scan social posts for false faces, voices, and information, while Mozilla’s Deepfake Detector analyzes text using multiple detection engines and generates a confidence score indicating the likelihood that the content is AI-generated. But while AI detection accuracy is improving, it isn’t perfect.

It always helps to try to verify the information itself — search for it along with “fact check” and look for trusted sources. For images, try a reverse image search using Google Image Search or Bing Image Match. 

What can misinformation look like on TikTok? 

Every social media site has its own AI landscape. Fake news, images and news clips targeting young voters and consumers are circulated particularly widely on TikTok due to its young user base. “Content farms” spin out inaccurate or misleading videos, often multiple a day in the distinctive TikTok style of on-screen text read by an AI voice. 

When scrolling on TikTok, be skeptical — or at least get a second opinion — on any informational videos that aren’t read by real people or only consist of captions to the AI voice (reputable news sites usually show who’s talking to build trust). Profiles that look like news sites but that have no comments or likes (especially for celebrity news) are a red flag — as well as canned phrases like “creepy response” or “finally broke their silence” meant to drive clicks. 

What can misinformation look like on X?

Though many AI-generated posts on X are largely innocuous text-based posts, videos in particular are more likely to be political deepfakes. And while the crowdsourced moderation feature, “Community Notes,” allows users to annotate posts with context or warnings, it replaced a more robust monitoring operation that means it’s more likely users will encounter bots. 

Stay wary of accounts that only spam replies, or situations where multiple accounts are commenting similar things under a post. If a user only posts replies, especially to inflammatory content, it’s a red flag that it’s a bot searching for certain keywords. 

Also, user verification on X is the least trustworthy of the major social media sites as users can pay for “verified” status (in one Cambridge study, half of synthetic profiles studied had verified status). 

What can misinformation look like on Facebook? 

It’s especially difficult to silo yourself from AI-generated content on Facebook, even if you’re only interested in posts from family and friends. Over the past three years, there has been a “significant increase” in the rate of users seeing posts they held no “friend” connection to, thanks to the algorithm that surfaces high-engagement posts in users’ feeds.

Being disciplined about clicking “not interested” under the three dots on each post can help stem the flow, as well as staying skeptical of images and being wary of link-outs to “news” sites. Verify posts (even those that appear to be from a harmless, real person) about any news events independently.

Misleading posts on Facebook are also especially focused on trying to get users off Facebook — directing them off the platform to content farms, fake stores and other scam sites. 

Stay alert and think critically online

Humans often overestimate how good they are at detecting AI — nice art is sometimes AI-generated, and terrible grammar is sometimes very human. It’s not easy to navigate a landscape designed to trick you, but your best call is to improve how you critically consume all information. Stay curious. After all, AI gets better every passing day — right down to drawing those tricky hands.

Sarah Skinner is a senior editor at a NYC tech startup. She holds a degree from Cornell University on AI and empathy, and has previously worked for McKinsey & Company and the Associated Press.

The post Misinformation in the age of AI: It’s in the details (like extra fingers) appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest – February 2025

Hello again Thunderbird Community! Despite the winter seeming to last forever and the world being in a state of flux, the Thunderbird team has been hard at work both in development and planning strategic projects. Here’s the latest from the team dedicated to making Thunderbird better each day:

Monthly Releases are here!

The concept of a stable monthly release channel has been in discussion for many years and I’m happy to share that we recently changed the default download on Thunderbird.net to point at our most feature-rich and up-to-date stable version. A lot of work went into this release channel, but for good reason – it brings the very latest in performance and UX improvements to users with a frequent cadence of updates. Meaning that you don’t have to wait a year to benefit from features that have been tested and already spent time on our more experimental Daily and Beta release channels. Some examples of features that you’ll find on the monthly release channel (but not on ESR) are:

  • Linux System Tray
  • Dark reader Support
  • Folder compaction improvements
  • Hundreds of UI enhancements
  • ICS Import
  • Calendar printing improvements
  • Appearance settings UI
  • Many, many more

Download it over the top of your ESR installation and get the benefits today!

Developing Standards

As privacy and security legislation evolves, the Thunderbird team often finds itself in the heart of discussions that have the potential to define industry solutions to emerging problems. In addition to the previously-mentioned research underway to develop post-quantum encryption support, we’re also currently considering solutions to EU laws (EU NIS2) that require multi-factor authentication be in place for critical digital infrastructure and services. We’re committed to solving these issues in a way that gives users and system administrators other options besides Google & Microsoft, and we’ll be sharing our thoughts on the matter soon, with the resulting decisions documented in our new ADR process.

For now, you can follow a healthy and colourful discussion on the topic of OAuth2 Dynamic Client Registration here.

Calendar UI Rebuild is underway

The long awaited UI/UX rebuild of the calendar has begun, with our first step being a new event dialog that we’re hoping to get into the hands of users on Daily via a preference switch. Turning the pref on will allow the existing calendar interface to launch the new dialog once complete. The following pieces of work have already landed:

  • Dialog container
  • Generic row container
  • Calendar row
  • Close button
  • Generic subview
  • Title

Keep track of feature delivery via the [meta] bug 

Exchange Web Services support in Rust

A big focus for February has been to grow our team so we’ve been busy interviewing and evaluating the tremendously talented individuals who have stepped forward to show interest in joining the team. In the remaining time, the team has managed to deliver another set of features and is heading toward a release on Daily that will result in most email features being made available for testing. Here’s what landed and started in February:

  • Display refactor
  • Basic testing framework
  • Sync folder – delete
  • Sync folder read/unread
  • Integration testing
  • Complete composition support (reply/forward)

Keep track of feature delivery here.

Account Hub

Since my last update, tasks related to density and font awareness, the exchange add-on and keyboard navigation were completed, with the details of each step available to view in our Meta bug & progress tracking. Watch out for this feature being rolled out as the default experience for the Daily build this week and on beta after the next merge on March 25th!

Global Message Database

The New Zealand team are in the middle of a work week to shout at the code together, have a laugh and console each other plan out work for the next several weeks. Their focus has been a sprint to prototype the integration of the new database with existing interfaces with a positive outcome meaning we’re a little closer to producing a work breakdown that paints a more accurate picture of what lies ahead. Onward!

In-App Notifications

Phase 3 of the project is underway to finalize our uplift stack and add in last-minute features! It is expected that our ESR version will have this new feature enabled for a small percentage of users at some point in April. If you use the ESR release, watch out for an introductory notification!

 Meta Bug & progress tracking.

New Features Landing Soon

Several requested features and fixes have reached our Daily users and include…

As usual, if you want to see things as they land, and help us squash some early bugs, you can always check the pushlog and try running daily, which would be immensely helpful for catching things early.

If you’re interested in joining the technical discussion around Thunderbird development, consider joining one or several of our mailing list groups here.

—

Toby Pilling
Senior Manager, Desktop Engineering

The post Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest – February 2025 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

The Mozilla Blog — Mozilla’s response to proposed remedies in U.S. v. Google

Last week the Department of Justice and some state attorneys general filed revised proposed remedies in the U.S. v. Google LLC search case. If the proposed remedies barring all search payments to browser developers are adopted by the court, these misguided plans would be a direct hit to small and independent browsers—the very forces that keep the web open, innovative and free. This case was meant to promote search competition, yet somehow the outcome threatens to crush browser competition, making it even harder for challengers to stand up to dominant players like Google, Apple and Microsoft.

“These proposed remedies prohibiting search payments to small and independent browsers miss the bigger picture—and the people who will suffer most are everyday internet users,” said Mark Surman, President of Mozilla. “Independent browsers like Firefox are on the frontlines of protecting consumer privacy, driving browser innovation, and giving people real choice on how they experience the web. But instead of promoting a fair fight, the DOJ’s remedies would tilt the playing field further into the hands of a few dominant players, diminishing consumer choice and weakening the broader internet ecosystem.”

The DOJ’s proposal hurts, not helps, browser competition

Mozilla agrees that we need to improve search competition, but the DOJ’s proposed remedies unnecessarily risk harming browser competition instead.

Here’s why:

  • The DOJ wants to ban all search agreements between Google and browsers, even independent browsers that make up a smaller part of the market.
  • Dominant players that own browsers, like Apple, don’t rely on search deals as they have significant revenue streams from other sources, like hardware, operating systems and app stores.
  • Meanwhile, independent browsers like Firefox fund the development of their browsers mainly through search revenue––they require this revenue to survive. Search revenue underpins a large part of our work, keeping Firefox competitive and ensuring that web users have privacy-first alternatives.
  • Punishing independent browsers will not solve the problem. Judge Mehta found that independent browsers account for just 1.15% of U.S. search queries. This means that cutting off our access to search deals won’t fix the issue of search dominance—not by a landslide. Instead, it hurts browser competition.

“The big unintended consequence here is the handing of power from one dominant player to another. So, from Google Search to Microsoft, or Bing for example—while shutting out the smaller, independent challengers that actually drive browser innovation and offer web users privacy and choice,” Surman added.

The last unicorn–the web can’t afford to lose Mozilla’s browser engine

Another thing missing from this conversation is something pretty important—browser engine competition.

You see, browser engines power the web. They are central to a browser’s speed, privacy and security functionality, and the browser’s ability to innovate and do things differently. But they’re very complex and require massive resources and a deep technical expertise to maintain—so much so, that right now only three major browser engines remain: Google’s Chromium, Apple’s Webkit (this engine is really only supported on Apple devices, and isn’t considered “cross-platfrom”), and then there’s Mozilla’s Gecko (which happens to be the only true cross-platform alternative to Chromium).

The DOJ’s proposal to bar search payments to independent browser developers would put Mozilla’s ability to develop and maintain Gecko at risk. If Mozilla is unable to sustain our browser engine, it would severely impact browser engine competition and mean the death of the open web as we know it—essentially, creating a web where dominant players like Google and Apple, have even more control, not less.

“This isn’t just about Firefox,” Surman explained. “If we lose our ability to maintain Gecko, it’s game over for an open, independent web. Look, Microsoft—a $3 trillion company—already gave up its browser engine in 2019 and Opera gave up theirs in 2013. If Mozilla is forced out, Google’s Chromium becomes the only cross-platform browser engine left.”

Mozilla’s role in an open web is BIGGER than our market share

Nevermind our market share, Mozilla has played an outsized role in keeping the web open, private and advocating for choice. Firefox still serves 27 million monthly active users (MAU) in the U.S. and nearly 205 million MAU globally, but our real impact comes from making the internet better by:

  • Shaping the future of web standards—maintaining our own browser engine, Gecko, gives us a voice in defining how the web works and making decisions that are in support of people, not the bottom-line.
  • Ensuring interoperability—we fight for a web accessible to all—where anyone can create, access, and share content seamlessly, regardless of the devices or web services they use—not locked into a few ecosystems.
  • Proving that privacy-respecting technology is possible—we build critical web technologies with security, privacy and user agency at the core.

“This isn’t something we do because it’s profitable or easy,” said Surman. “We do it because it matters. The DOJ’s proposal doesn’t just miss the mark, it risks handing even more power to dominant industry players like Google or Apple, not less.”

Mozilla calls on regulators and policymakers to recognize the vital role of independent browsers and take action to nurture competition, innovation, and protect the public interest in the evolving digital landscape.

Mozilla is committed to ensuring a fair and competitive internet ecosystem, one where independent browsers can compete on a level playing field and consumers have real choice. The future of competition, innovation and the open internet depends on us.

The post Mozilla’s response to proposed remedies in U.S. v. Google appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Monday, 10 March 2025

Mozilla Add-ons Blog — Root certificate will expire on 14 March — users need to update Firefox to prevent add-on breakage

Firefox logoUPDATE – 19 March

We’ve discovered a bug impacting some older extensions for users on Firefox 128+ or ESR 115 (in this case even updating Firefox won’t resolve the root certificate expiration). We’re working on fixes that will ship soon.

Otherwise, we recommend keeping Firefox and your extensions up to date. This will resolve the vast majority of root certification issues.

On 14 March a root certificate (the resource used to prove an add-on was approved by Mozilla) will expire, meaning Firefox users on versions older than 128 (or ESR 115) will not be able to use their add-ons. We want developers to be aware of this in case some of your users are on older versions of Firefox that may be impacted.

Should you see bug reports or negative reviews reflecting the effects of the certificate expiration, we recommend alerting your users to this support article that summarizes the issue and guides them through the process of updating Firefox so their add-ons work again.

The post Root certificate will expire on 14 March — users need to update Firefox to prevent add-on breakage appeared first on Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog.

Thursday, 6 March 2025

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird for Android January/February 2025 Progress Report

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first Android Progress Report of 2025. We’re ready to hit the ground running improving Thunderbird for Android experience for all of our users. Our January/February update involves a look at improvements to the account drawer and folders on our roadmap, an update on Google and K-9 Mail, and explores our first step towards Thunderbird on iOS.

Account Drawer Improvements

As we noted in our last post on the blog, improving the account drawer experience is one of our top priorities for development in 2025. We heard your feedback and want to make sure we provide an account drawer that lets you navigate between accounts easily and efficiently. Let’s briefly go into the most common feedback:

  • The accounts on the same domains or with similar names are difficult to distinguish from the two letters provided.
  • It isn’t clear how the account name influences the initials.
  • The icons seemed to be jumping around, especially obvious with 3–5 accounts.
  • There is a lot of spacing in the new drawer.
  • Users would like more customization options, such as an account picture or icon.
  • Some users would like to see a broader view that shows the whole account name.
  • With just one account, the accounts sidebar isn’t very useful.

Our design folks are working on some mockups on where the journey is taking us. We’re going to share them on the beta topicbox where you can provide more targeted feedback, but for a sneak peek here is a medium-fidelity mockup of what the new drawer and settings could look like:

On the technical side, we’ve integrated an image loader for the upcoming pictures. We now need to gradually adapt the mockups. We will begin with the settings screen changes and then adapt the drawer itself to follow.

Notifications and Error States

Some of you had the feeling your email was not arriving quick enough. While email delivery is reliable, there are a few settings in Thunderbird for Android and K-9 mail that aren’t obvious leading to confusion. When permissions are not granted, functionality is simply turned off instead of telling the user they actually need to grant the alarms permission for us to do a regular sync. Or maybe the sync interval is simply set to the default of 1 hour.

We’re still in the process of mapping out the best experience here, but will have more updates soon. See the notifications support article in case you are experiencing issues. A few things we’re aiming for this year:

  • Show an indicator in foreground service notification when push isn’t working for all configured folders
  • Show more detailed information when foreground service notification is tapped
  • Move most error messages from the system notifications to an area in-app to clearly identify when there is an error
  • Make authentication errors, certificate errors, and persistent connectivity issues use the new in-app mechanism
  • Make the folder synchronization settings more clear (ever wondered why there is “sync” and “push” and if you should have both enabled or not?)
  • Prompt for permissions when they are needed, such as aforementioned alarms permission
  • Indicate to the user if permissions are missing for their folder settings.
  • Better debug tool in case of notification issues.

Road(map) to the Highway

Our roadmap is currently under review from the Thunderbird council. Once we have their final approval, we’ll update the roadmap documentation. While we’re waiting, we would like to share some of the items we’ve proposed:

  • Listening to community feedback on Mozilla Connect and implementing HTML signatures and quick filter actions, similar to the Thunderbird Desktop
  • Backend refactoring work on the messages database to improve synchronization
  • Improving the message display so that you’ll see fewer prompts to download additional messages
  • Adding Android 15 compatibility, which is mainly Edge to Edge support
  • Improving the QR code import defaults (relates to notification settings as well)
  • Making better product decisions by (re-)introducing a limited amount of opt-in telemetry.

Does that sound exciting to you? Would you like to be a part of this but don’t feel you have the time? Are you good at writing Android apps in Kotlin and have an interest in muti-platform work? Well, do I have a treat for you! We’re hiring an Android Senior Software Engineer to work on Thunderbird for Android!

K-9 Mail Blocked from Gmail

We briefly touched on this in the last update as well: some of our users on K-9 Mail have noticed issues with an “App Blocked” error when trying to log into certain Gmail accounts. Google is asking K-9 Mail to go through a new verification process and has introduced some additional requirements that were not needed before. Users that are already logged in or have logged in recently should not be affected currently.

Meeting these requirements depended on several factors beyond our control, so we weren’t able to resolve this immediately.

If you are experiencing this issue on K-9 Mail, the quickest workaround is to migrate to Thunderbird for Android, or check out one of the other options on the support page. For those interested, more technical details can be found in issue 8598. We’re using keys on this application that have so far not been blocked. Our account import feature will make this transition pretty seamless. 

We’ve been able to make some major progress on this, we have a vendor for the required CASA review and expect the letter of validation to be shared soon. We’re still hitting a wall with Google, as they are giving us inconsistent information on the state of the review, and making some requirements on the privacy policy that sound more like they are intended for web apps. We’ve made an effort to clarify this further and hope that Google will accept our revised policy.

If all goes well we’ll get approval by the end of the month, and then need to make some changes to the key distribution so that Thunderbird and K-9 use the intended keys. 

Our Plans for Thunderbird on iOS

If you watched the Thunderbird Community Office Hours for January, you might have noticed us talking about iOS. You heard right – our plans for the Thunderbird iOS app are getting underway! We’ve been working on some basic architectural decisions and plan to publish a barebones repository on GitHub soon. You can expect a readme and some basic tools, but the real work will begin when we’ve hired a Senior Software Engineer who will lead development of a Thunderbird app for the iPhone and iPad. Interviews for some candidates have started and we wish them all the best!

With this upcoming hire, we plan to have alpha code available on Test Flight by the end of the year. To set expectations up front, functionality will be quite basic. A lof of work goes into writing an email application from scratch. We’re going to be focusing on a basic display of email messages, and then expanding to triage actions. Sending basic emails is also on our list.

FOSDEM

Our team recently attended FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. For those unfamiliar with FOSDEM, it’s the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting—an event where many open-source enthusiasts come together to connect, share knowledge and ideas, and showcase the projects they’re passionate about.

We received a lot of valuable feedback from the community on Thunderbird for Android. Some key areas of feedback included the need for Exchange support, improvements to the folder drawer, performance enhancements, push notifications (and some confusion around their functionality), and much more.

Our team was highly engaged in listening to this feedback, and we will take all of it into account as we plan our future roadmap. Thunderbird has always been a project developed in tandem with our community and it was exciting for us to be at FOSDEM to connect with our users, contributors and friends.

In other news…

As always, you can join our Android-related mailing lists on TopicBox. And if you want to help us test new features, you can become a beta tester.

This blog post talks a lot about the exciting things we have planned for 2025. We’re also hiring for two positions, and may have a third one later in the year. While our software is free and open source, creating a world class email application isn’t without a cost. If you haven’t already made a contribution in January,  please consider supporting our work with a financial contribution. Thunderbird for Android relies entirely on user funding, so without your support we could likely only get to a fraction of what you see here. Making a contribution is really easy if you have Thunderbird for Android or K-9 Mail installed, just head over to the settings and sign up directly from your device. 

See you next month,

The post Thunderbird for Android January/February 2025 Progress Report appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Tuesday, 4 March 2025

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird Release Channel Update

The monthly Release channel is ready to help you move from annual to monthly updates in Thunderbird. This update lets you know how to switch from the annual update (ESR) to monthly updates (Release), why you might have to wait, and what features you’ll get first!

How do I switch from annual to monthly updates (ESR to Release)?

Right now, you can switch to the Release channel through manual installs only from the Thunderbird website Downloads page.  Other installation sources will have the Release version in the future such as Windows Store,  3rd-party sites and various Linux packages such as Snap and Flatpak.  

If you use Add-ons, however, we recommend checking if your installed Add-ons work in the Release channel with versions 136.0 or higher.

First, back up your profile data, as you should always do before making major changes. And check that your computer meets the System Requirements for version 136.  Then go to the Downloads page of the website. If Release Channel does not show “Thunderbird Release” then correct it. Click the ‘Download’ button. For Windows and macOS, run the downloaded file to install the monthly release into the same directory where the ESR is currently installed. (If you have installed Thunderbird ESR into a directory that is different from the default location, then you must do a custom installation to that directory.)  For Linux, consult the Linux installation knowledge base (KB) article.  

I switched to Release but I want to switch back to ESR. How do I do this?

If you switched to Release but want to switch back, for example, because of Add-ons, follow the steps below. Please note, this is valid for the current Release and ESR channels, and we will update here in the event of an underlying database change in ESR that would not make this possible:

What’s new in 136.0?

Now that you know how to make the switch, here’s some reasons to make the change. Here are some of the key features you’ll get as soon as you upgrade to the Release channel:

Improved Dark Reader

Enable dark reader for the message pane with `mail.dark-reader.enabled` preference

Improved Dark Mode

Messages are automatically adapted to dark mode with a quick toggle in the header

A Global Switch for Threading

New “Appearance” Settings UI to globally control message threading/sorting order

Filters in the Folder Pane

Message filters are now available in the Folder Pane context menu

Horizontal Threadpane Scrolling

Enable horizontal threadpane scrolling with `mail.threadpane.table.horizontal_scroll` preference

Improved Calendar Setup Wizard

Added checkbox to select/unselect all calendars in the calendar setup wizard

See all the changes in our Release Notes.

The post Thunderbird Release Channel Update appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Monday, 3 March 2025

Mozilla Add-ons Blog — Styling your listing page on AMO with Markdown

The Mozilla Add-ons team is excited to announce that developers can now style content on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) using Markdown.

From the early days of AMO developers have been able to style parts of their add-ons’ listings using basic HTML tags like <b>, <code>, and <abbr>. This has been a great way for developers to emphasize information or add character to their listings. This feature has, unfortunately, also been a common source of mistakes. It’s not unusual to see HTML tags in listings due to closing tags, typos, or developers trying to use unsupported HTML elements.

To address this common source of errors and to better align with other tools that developers use, Mozilla has replaced AMO’s limited HTML support with a limited set of Markdown.

Our flavor of Markdown

AMO supports about a dozen Markdown rules: bold, italic, monospace, links, abbreviations, code blocks, blockquotes, ordered lists, and unordered lists. HTML is not supported. The full list of supported syntax and examples can be found in our documentation.

Currently, Markdown can be used in four areas: an add-on’s description, a custom license, custom privacy policy, and in review replies posted by the developer.

As before, links are automatically replaced by a version that is routed through AMO’s link bouncer.

How this change affects HTML content

AMO’s Markdown does not support HTML content. As a result, any HTML entered in a field that supports Markdown will display as plain text.

This change is not retroactive. Any content authored while HTML was supported will continue to display as originally intended. Only content updated after Markdown support was added will be treated as Markdown.

The post Styling your listing page on AMO with Markdown appeared first on Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog.

Tuesday, 25 February 2025

Open Policy & Advocacy — Mozilla Joins Amicus Brief in Support of Law That Protects Your Private Messages

Today Mozilla has joined an amicus brief in the California Supreme Court defending statutory privacy protections for messages on services such as Snapchat or Facebook. The amicus brief asks the court to overrule a lower court opinion that would significantly reduce the legal privacy protections for users of these widely used services. Mozilla is joined on the brief by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Back in 1986, Congress passed a law called the Stored Communications Act (SCA) to provide privacy protections for stored electronic communications such as email. The SCA prohibits service providers from sharing private messages with the government or other third-parties without authorization. For example, it requires that the government must get a warrant to access recent communications (or at least a subpoena in other circumstances). In the years since 1986, it is fair to say we have developed many new forms of digital communication. Fortunately, the language of the SCA is sufficiently general (it uses the term “electronic communication service”) that courts have applied it to a large array of new products.

Unfortunately, a California court recently narrowed the scope of the SCA. In the case of Snap v. The Superior Court of San Diego County, the California Court of Appeal ruled that the SCA does not protect users of Snapchat and Facebook. The court concluded that the SCA does not apply because, in addition to facilitating transmission of messages and storing backups, these companies also maintain that content for their own business purposes such as targeted advertising. If upheld, this ruling would remove the SCA’s protection not just for users of Snap and Facebook, but for many other modern forms of communication.

While we may criticize some of Snap or Meta’s data practices, it would only compound the privacy harm to their users to hold that their privacy policies take them outside the scope of the SCA, with potential ramifications for the users of other services in the future. Our brief argues that this is both wrong on the law and bad policy. We hope the California Supreme Court will fix the lower court’s error and restore key statutory privacy protections to modern messaging services.

The post Mozilla Joins Amicus Brief in Support of Law That Protects Your Private Messages appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

Thursday, 13 February 2025

hacks.mozilla.org — Launching Interop 2025

Launching Interop 2025

The Interop Project is a collaboration between browser vendors and other platform implementors to provide users and web developers with high quality implementations of the web platform.

Each year we select a set of focus areas representing key areas where we want to improve interoperability. Encouraging all browser engines to prioritize common features ensures they become usable for web developers as quickly as possible.

Progress in each engine and the overall Interop score are measured by tracking the pass rate of a set of web-platform tests for each focus area using the Interop dashboard.

Interop 2024

Before introducing the new focus areas for this year, we should look at the successes of Interop 2024.

The Interop score, measuring the percentage of tests that pass in all of the major browser engines, has reached 95% in latest browser releases, up from only 46% at the start of the year. In pre-release browsers it’s even higher — over 97%. This is a huge win that shows how effective Interop can be at aligning browsers with the specifications and each other.

Each browser engine individually achieved a test pass score of 98% in stable browser releases and 99% in pre-release, with Firefox finishing slightly ahead with 98.8% in release and 99.1% in Nightly.

For users, this means features such as requestVideoFrameCallback, Declarative Shadow DOM, and Popover, which a year ago only had limited availability, are now implemented interoperably in all browsers.

Interop 2025

Building on Interop 2024’s success, we are excited to continue the project into 2025. This year we have 19 focus areas; 17 new and 2 from previous years. A full description of all the focus areas is available in the Interop repository.

From 2024 we’re carrying forward Layout (really “Flexbox and Grid”), and Pointer and Mouse Events. These are important platform primitives where the Interop project has already led to significant interoperability improvements. However, with technologies that are so fundamental to the modern web we think it’s important to set ambitious goals and continue to prioritize these areas, creating rock solid foundations for developers to build on.

The new focus areas represent a broad cross section of the platform. Many of them — like Anchor Positioning and View Transitions — have been identified from clear developer demand in surveys such as State of HTML and State of CSS. Inclusion in Interop will ensure they’re usable as soon as possible.

In addition to these high profile new features, we’d like to highlight some lesser-known focus areas and explain why we’re pleased to see them in Interop.

Storage Access

At Mozilla user privacy is a core principle. One of the most common methods for tracking across the web is via third-party cookies. When sites request data from external services, the service can store data that’s re-sent when another site uses the same service. Thus the service can follow the user’s browsing across the web.

To counter this, Firefox’s “Total Cookie Protection” partitions storage so that third parties receive different cookie data per site and thus reduces tracking. Other browsers have similar policies, either by default or in private browsing modes.

However, in some cases, non-tracking workflows such as SSO authentication depend on third party cookies. Storage partitioning can break these workflows, and browsers currently have to ship site-specific workarounds. The Storage Access API solves this by letting sites request access to the unpartitioned cookies. Interop here will allow browsers to advance privacy protections without breaking critical functionality.

Web Compat

The Web Compat focus area is unique in Interop. It isn’t about one specific standard, but focuses on browser bugs known to break sites. These are often in older parts of the platform with long-standing inconsistencies. Addressing these requires either aligning implementations with the standard or, where that would break sites, updating the standard itself.

One feature in the Web Compat focus area for 2025 is CSS Zoom. Originally a proprietary feature in Internet Explorer, it allowed scaling layout by adjusting the computed dimensions of elements at a time before CSS transforms. WebKit reverse-engineered it, bringing it into Blink, but Gecko never implemented it, due to the lack of a specification and the complexities it created in layout calculations.

Unfortunately, a feature not being standardised doesn’t prevent developers from using it. Use of CSS Zoom led to layout issues on some sites in Firefox, especially on mobile. We tried various workarounds and have had success using interventions to replace zoom with CSS transforms on some affected sites, but an attempt to implement the same approach directly in Gecko broke more sites than it fixed and was abandoned.

The situation seemed to be at an impasse until 2023 when Google investigated removing CSS Zoom from Chromium. Unfortunately, it turned out that some use cases, such as Microsoft Excel Online’s worksheet zoom, depended on the specific behaviour of CSS Zoom, so removal was not feasible. However, having clarified the use cases, the Chromium team was able to propose a standardized model for CSS Zoom that was easier to implement without compromising compatibility. This proposal was accepted by the CSS WG and led to the first implementation of CSS Zoom in Firefox 126, 24 years after it was first released in Internet Explorer.

With Interop 2025, we hope to bring the story of CSS Zoom to a close with all engines finally converging on the same behaviour, backed by a real open standard.

WebRTC

Video conferencing is now an essential feature of modern life, and in-browser video conferencing offers both ease of use and high security, as users are not required to download a native binary. Most web-based video conferencing relies on the WebRTC API, which offers high level tools for implementing real time communications. However, WebRTC has long suffered from interoperability issues, with implementations deviating from the standards and requiring nonstandard extensions for key features. This resulted in confusion and frustration for users and undermined trust in the web as a reliable alternative to native apps.

Given this history, we’re excited to see WebRTC in Interop for the first time. The main part of the focus area is the RTCRtpScriptTransform API, which enables cross browser end-to-end encryption. Although there’s more to be done in the future, we believe Interop 2025 will be a big step towards making WebRTC a truly interoperable web standard.

Removing Mutation Events

The focus area for Removing Mutation Events is the first time Interop has been used to coordinate the removal of a feature. Mutation events fire when the DOM changes, meaning the event handlers run on the critical path for DOM manipulation, causing major performance issues, and significant implementation complexity. Despite the fact that they have been implemented in all engines, they’re so problematic that they were never standardised. Instead, mutation observers were developed as a standard solution for the use cases of mutation events without their complexity or performance problems. Almost immediately after mutation observers were implemented, a Gecko bug was filed:

“We now have mutation observers, and we’d really like to kill support for mutation events at some point in the future. Probably not for a while yet.”

That was in 2012. The difficulty is the web’s core commitment to backwards compatibility. Removing features that people rely on is unacceptable. However, last year Chromium determined that use of mutation events had dropped low enough to allow a “deprecation trial“, disabling mutation events by default, but allowing specific sites to re-enable them for a limited time.

This is good news, but long-running deprecation trials can create problems for other browsers. Disabling the feature entirely can break sites that rely on the opt-out. On the other hand we know from experience that some sites actually function better in a browser with mutation events disabled (for example, because they are used for non-critical features, but impact performance).

By including this removal in Interop 2025, we can ensure that mutation events are fully removed in 2025 and end the year with reduced platform complexity and improved web performance.

Interop Investigations

As well as focus areas, the Interop project also runs investigations aimed at long-term interoperability improvements to areas where we can’t measure progress using test pass rates. For example Interop investigations can be looking to add new test capabilities, or increase the test coverage of platform features.

Accessibility Investigation

The accessibility testing started as part of Interop 2023. It has added APIs for testing accessible name and computed role, as well as more than 1000 new tests. Those tests formed the Accessibility focus area in Interop 2024, which achieved an Interop score of 99.7%.

In 2025 the focus will be expanding the testability of accessibility features. Mozilla is working on a prototype of AccessibleNode; an API that enables verifying the shape of the accessibility tree, along with its states and properties. This will allow us to test the effect of features like CSS display: contents or ::before/::after on the accessibility tree.

Mobile Testing Investigation

Today, all Interop focus areas are scored in desktop browsers. However, some features are mobile-specific or have interoperability challenges unique to mobile.

Improving mobile testing has been part of Interop since 2023, and in that time we’ve made significant progress standing up mobile browsers in web-platform-tests CI systems. Today we have reliable runs of Chrome and Firefox Nightly on Android, and Safari runs on iOS are expected soon. However, some parts of our test framework were written with desktop-specific assumptions in the design, so the focus for 2025 will be on bringing mobile testing to parity with desktop. The goal is to allow mobile-specific focus areas in future Interop projects, helping improve interoperability across all device types.

Driving the Web Forward

The unique and distinguishing feature of the web platform is its basis in open standards, providing multiple implementations and user choice. Through the Interop project, web platform implementors collaborate to ensure that these core strengths are matched by a seamless user experience across browsers.

With focus areas covering some of the most important new and existing areas of the modern web, Interop 2025 is set to deliver some of the biggest interoperability wins of the project so far. We are confident that Firefox and other browsers will rise to the challenge, providing users and developers with a more consistent and reliable web platform.

Partner Announcements

The post Launching Interop 2025 appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog.

Tuesday, 11 February 2025

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest – January 2025

Hello again Thunderbird Community! As January drew to a close, the team was closing in on the completion of some important milestones. Additionally, we had scoped work for our main Q1 priorities. Those efforts are now underway and it feels great to cross things off the list and start tackling new challenges.

As always, you can catch up on all of our previous digests and updates.

FOSDEM – Inspiration, collaboration and education

A modest contingent from the Thunderbird team joined our Mozilla counterparts for an educational and inspiring weekend at Fosdem recently. We talked about standards, problems, solutions and everything in between. However, the most satisfying part of the weekend being standing at the Thunderbird booth and hearing the gratitude, suggestions and support from so many users.

With such important discussions among leading voices, we’re keen to help in finding or implementing solutions to some of the meatier topics such as:

  • OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration Protocol
  • Support for unicode email addresses
  • Support for OpenPGP certification authorities and trust delegation

Exchange Web Services support in Rust

With a reduction in team capacity for part of January, the team was able to complete work on the following tasks that form some of the final stages in our 0.2 release:

  • Folder compaction
  • Saving attachments to disk
  • Download EWS messages in an nsIChannel

Keep track of feature delivery here.

Account Hub

We completed the second and final milestone in the First Time User Experience for email configuration via the enhanced Account Hub over the course of January. Tasks included density and font awareness, refactoring of state management, OAuth prompts, enhanced error handling and more which can be followed via Meta bug & progress tracking. Watch out for this feature being unveiled in daily and beta in the coming weeks!

Global Message Database

With a significant number of the research and prototyping tasks now behind us, the project has taken shape over the course of January with milestones and tasks mapped out. Recent progress has been related to live view, sorting and support for Unicode server and folder names. 

Next up is to finally crack the problem of “non-unique unique IDs” mentioned previously, which is important preparatory groundwork required for a clean database migration. 

In-App Notifications

Phase 2 is now complete, and almost ready for uplift to ESR, pending underlying Firefox dependencies scheduled in early March. Features and user stories in the latest milestone include a cache-control mechanism, a thorough accessibility review, schema changes and the addition of guard rails to limit notification frequency. Meta Bug & progress tracking.

New Features Landing Soon

Several requested features and fixes have reached our Daily users and include…

To see things as they land, and help squash early bugs, you can check the pushlog and try running daily. This would be immensely helpful for catching things early.

—

Toby Pilling
Senior Manager, Desktop Engineering

The post Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest – January 2025 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Thursday, 6 February 2025

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird Desktop Release Channel Will Become Default in March 2025

UPDATE (March 4, 2025): The Release Channel is now default! See our update post on how to make the switch with a manual install and what’s new in 136.

We have an exciting announcement! Starting with the 136.0 release in March 2025, the Thunderbird Desktop Release channel will be the default download.

If you’re not already familiar with the Release channel, it will be a supported alternative to the ESR channel. It will provide monthly major releases instead of annual major releases. This provides several benefits to our users:

  • Frequent Feature Updates: New features will potentially be available each month, versus the annual Extended Support Release (ESR).
  • Smoother Transitions: Moving from one monthly release to the next will be less disruptive than updating between ESR versions.
  • Consistent Bug Fixes: Users will receive all available bug fixes, rather than relying on patch uplifts, as is the case with ESR.

We’ve been publishing monthly releases since 124.0. We added the Thunderbird Desktop Release Channel to the download page on Oct 1st, 2024.

The next step is to make the release channel an officially supported channel and the default download. We don’t expect this step alone to increase the population significantly. We’re exploring additional methods to encourage adoption in the future, such as in-app notifications to invite ESR users to switch.

One of our goals for 2025 is to increase daily active installations on the release channel to at least 20% of the total installations. At last check, we had 29,543 daily active installations on the release channel, compared to 20,918 on beta, and 5,941 on daily. The release channel installations currently account for 0.27% of the 10,784,551 total active installations tracked on stats.thunderbird.net.

To support this transition and ensure stability for monthly releases, we’re implementing several process improvements, including:

  • Pre-merge freezes: A 4-day soft code freeze of comm-central before merging into comm-beta. We continue to bake the week-long post-merge freeze of the release channel into the schedule.
  • Pre-merge reviews: We evaluate changes prior to both merges (central to beta and beta to release) where risky changes can be reverted.
  • New uplift template: A new and more thorough uplift template.

For more details on these release process details, please see the Release section of the developer docs.

For more details on scheduling, please see the Thunderbird Releases & Events calendar.

Thank you for your support with this exciting step for Thunderbird. Let’s work together to make the Release channel a success in 2025!

Regards,
Corey

Corey Bryant
Manager, Release Operations | Mozilla Thunderbird

Note: This blog post was taken from Corey’s original announcement at our Thunderbird Planning mailing list

The post Thunderbird Desktop Release Channel Will Become Default in March 2025 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

about:community — FOSDEM 2025: A Celebration of Open Source Innovation

Amazing weather at FOSDEM 2025Brussels came alive this weekend as Mozilla joined FOSDEM 2025, Europe’s premier open-source conference. FOSDEM wasn’t just another tech gathering. It is a representation of a vibrant community, open source innovation, and the spirit of collaboration. And we’re proud of being part of this amazing event since its inception.

This year, FOSDEM is celebrating its 25th anniversary. And unlike previous years’ gloomy weather, this year, we were blessed with surprising sunshine, almost as if the universe was applauding a quarter-century of open-source achievements.

As for Mozilla, our presence this year was extra special as we introduced our new brand. Over the weekend, we ran a bingo challenge in Mozilla’s and Thunderbird’s stands, where participants could play to win exclusive Mozilla t-shirts any many more special swag. It was a really fun way to introduce many projects from across pan-Mozilla.

We also showcased a sneak peek of Firefox Nightly’s new tab group feature in the Mozilla booth and gave away 2300 free cookies to participants on Saturday.

Here are some more highlights from our presence this year:

Highlights from Saturday

  • Mozilla engineering manager Marco Casteluccio presented a talk about the usage of LLM’s to support Firefox developers with code review in the main track.
  • Firefox engineer Valentin Gosu also presented a talk in the DNS track about his journey on using the getaddrinfo API in Firefox.
  • Another Firefox engineer who’s working on Firefox Profiler, Nazim Can Altinova also presented a talk in the Web Performance track. It’s also worth mentioning that the Web Performance devroom was co-run by some Mozillians.
  • Danny Colin, one of Mozilla’s active contributors, hosted a WebExtension BoF session featuring representatives from Mozilla Firefox (Rob Wu & Simeon Vincent) and Google Chrome’s extensions team (Oliver Dunk). This was the first time the team ran a Birds Of a Feather session, and it’s very likely that we’re going to do the same next year.
  • Danny Colin also hosted the Community Gathering where old and new contributors got together to discuss the future of Mozilla’s community. It was really nice to have an interactive session like this where all of us can share our perspective, so thank you to all of you who attended the session!

Highlights from Sunday

Mitchell Baker is presenting at FOSDEM 2025

  • Mitchell Baker kicked off Sunday with a keynote session that offered a thought-provoking exploration of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) in the age of artificial intelligence and demonstrated how Mozilla plays a role in defining principled approach to AI that prioritizes transparency, ethics, and community-driven innovation. It was a perfect opening for the talks that we presented at the Mozilla devroom later that day.
  • Around the same time as Mitchell’s session, Mozilla engineer Max Inden also delivered a presentation in the Network devroom, showcasing various techniques the Firefox team uses to enhance Firefox performance.
  • Then on the second half on Sunday, we also hosted the Mozilla devroom where we covered a wide range of Mozilla’s latest innovations from Mythbusting to Mozilla’s AI innovations and Firefox developments. Recordings will be available soon at FOSDEM’s website and via our YouTube channel. So stay tuned!

We’re grateful for the enthusiasm, conversations, and curiosity of attendees at FOSDEM 2025. And big thanks to our amazing volunteers and Mozillians for co-hosting our booth and the Mozilla devroom this year.

We sure had a blast, and we can’t wait to see you again next year!

Tuesday, 4 February 2025

Open Policy & Advocacy — Navigating the Future of Openness and AI Governance: Insights from the Paris Openness Workshop

In December 2024, in the lead up to the AI Action Summit, Mozilla, Fondation Abeona, École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and the Columbia Institute of Global Politics gathered at ENS in Paris, bringing together a diverse group of AI experts, academics, civil society, regulators and business leaders to discuss a topic increasingly central to the future of AI: what does openness mean and how it can enable trustworthy, innovative, and equitable outcomes?

The workshop followed the Columbia Convenings on Openness and AI, that Mozilla held in partnership with Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics. These gatherings, held over the course of 2024 in New York and San Francisco, have brought together over 40 experts to address what “openness” should mean in the AI era.

Over the past two years, Mozilla has mounted a significant effort to promote and defend the role of openness in AI. Mozilla launched Mozilla.ai, an initiative focused on ethical, open-source AI tools, and supported small-scale, localized AI projects through its Builders accelerator program. Beyond technical investments, Mozilla has also been a vocal advocate for openness in AI policy, urging governments to adopt regulatory frameworks that foster competition and accountability while addressing risks. Through these initiatives, Mozilla is shaping a future where AI development aligns with public interest values.

This Paris Openness workshop discussion — part of the official ‘Road to the Paris AI Summit’ taking place in February 2025 — looked to bring together the European AI community and form actionable recommendations for policymakers. While it embraced healthy debate and disagreement around issues such as definitions of openness in AI, there was nevertheless broad agreement on the urgency of crafting collective ideas to advance openness while navigating an increasingly complex commercial, political and regulatory landscape.

The stakes could not be higher. As AI continues to shape our societies, economies, and governance systems, openness emerges as both an opportunity and a challenge. On one hand, open approaches can expand access to AI tools, foster innovation, and enhance transparency and accountability. On the other hand, they raise complex questions about safety and misuse. In Europe, these questions intersect with transformative regulatory frameworks like the EU AI Act, which seeks to ensure that AI systems are both safe and aligned with fundamental rights.

As in software development, the goal of being ‘open’ in AI is a crucial one. At its heart, openness, we were reminded in the discussion, is a holistic outlook. For AI in particular it is a pathway to getting to a more pluralistic tool – one that can be more transparent, contextual, participatory and culturally appropriate. Each of these goals however contain natural tensions within them.

A central question of this most recent dialogue challenged participants on the best ways to build with safety in mind while also embracing openness. The day was broken down into two workshops that examined these questions from a technical and policy standpoint.

Running through both of the workshops was the thread of a persistent challenge: the multifaceted nature of the term openness. In the policy context, the term “open-source” can be too narrow, and at times, it risks being seen as an ideological stance rather than a pragmatic tool for addressing specific issues. To address this, many participants felt openness should be framed as a set of components — including open models, data, and tools — each of which has specific benefits and risks.

Examining Technical Perspectives on Openness and Safety

A significant concern for many in the open-source community is getting access to the best existing safety tools. Despite the increasing importance of AI safety, many researchers can find it difficult or expensive to access tools to help identify and address AI risks. In particular the discussion surfaced an increasing tension between some researchers and startups who have found it difficult to access datasets of known CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) hashtags. Accessing these data sets could help mitigate misuse or clean training datasets. The workshop called for broader sharing of safety tools and more support for those working at the cutting edge of AI development.

More widely, some participants were frustrated by perceptions that open source AI development is not bothered by questions of safety. They pointed out that, especially when it comes to regulation, focusing on questions of safety makes them even more competitive.

Discussing Policy Implications of Openness in AI

Policy discussions during the workshop focused on the economic, societal, and regulatory dimensions of openness in AI. These ranged over several themes, including:

  1. Challenging perceptions of openness: There is a clear need to change the narrative around openness, especially in policymaking circles. The open-source community must both act as a community and present itself as knowledgeable and solution-oriented, demonstrating how openness can be a means to advancing the public interest — not an abstract ideal. As one participant pointed out, openness should be viewed as a tool for societal benefit, not as an end in itself.
  2. Tensions between regulation and innovation are misleading: As one of the first regulatory frameworks on AI to be drafted, many people view the EU’s AI Act as a test bed to get to smarter AI regulation. While there is a widespread characterisation of regulation obstructing innovation, some participants highlighted that this can be misleading — many new entrants seek out jurisdictions with favourable regulatory and competition policies that level the playing field.
  3. A changing U.S. Perspective: In the United States, the open-source AI agenda has gained significant traction, particularly in the wake of incidents like the Llama leaks, which showed that many of the feared risks associated with openness did not materialize. Significantly, the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration emphasized the benefits of open source AI technology and introduced a nuanced view of safety concerns around open-weight AI models.

Many participants also agreed that policymakers, many of whom are not deeply immersed in the technicalities of AI, need a clearer framework for understanding the value of openness. Considering the focus of the upcoming Paris AI Summit, some participants felt one solution could lie in focusing on public interest AI. This concept resonates more directly with broader societal goals while still acknowledging the risks and challenges that openness brings.

Recommendations 

Embracing openness in AI is non-negotiable if we are to build trust and safety; it fosters transparency, accountability, and inclusive collaboration. Openness must extend beyond software to broader access to the full AI stack, including data and infrastructure, with a governance that safeguards public interest and prevents monopolization.

It is clear that the open source community must make its voice louder. If AI is to advance competition, innovation, language, research, culture and creativity for the global majority of people, then an evidence-based approach to the benefits of openness, particularly when it comes to proven economic benefits, is essential for driving this agenda forward.

Several recommendations for policymakers also emerged.

  1. Diversify AI Development: Policymakers should seek to diversify the AI ecosystem, ensuring that it is not dominated by a few large corporations in order to foster more equitable access to AI technologies and reduce monopolistic control. This should be approached holistically, looking at everything from procurement to compute strategies.
  2. Support Infrastructure and Data Accessibility: There is an urgent need to invest in AI infrastructure, including access to data and compute power, in a way that does not exacerbate existing inequalities. Policymakers should prioritize distribution of resources to ensure that smaller actors, especially those outside major tech hubs, are not locked out of AI development.
  3. Understand openness as central to achieving AI that serves the public interest. One of the official tracks of the upcoming Paris AI Action Summit is Public Interest AI. Increasingly, openness should be deployed as a main route to truly publicly interested AI.
  4. Openness should be an explicit EU policy goal: As one of the furthest along in AI regulatory frameworks the EU will continue to be a testbed for many of the big questions in AI policy. The EU should adopt an explicit focus on promoting openness in AI as a policy goal.

We will be raising all the issues discussed while at the AI Action Summit in Paris. The organizers hope to host another set of these discussions following the conclusion of the Summit in order to continue working with the community and to better inform governments and other stakeholders around the world.

The list of participants at the Paris Openness Workshop is below:

  • Linda Griffin – VP of Global Policy, Mozilla
  • Udbhav Tiwari – Director, Global Product Policy, Mozilla
  • Camille François – Researcher, Columbia University
  • Tanya Perelmuter – Co-founder and Director of Strategy,, Fondation Abeona
  • Yann Lechelle – CEO, Probabl
  • Yann Guthmann – Head of Digital Economy, Department at the French Competition Authority
  • Adrien Basdevant – Tech lawyer, Entropy Law
  • Andrzej Neugebauer – AI Program Director, LINAGORA
  • Thierry Poibeau – Director of Research, CNRS, ENS
  • Nik Marda – Technical Lead for AI Governance, Mozilla
  • Andrew Strait – Associate Director, Ada Lovelace Institute (UK)
  • Paul Keller – Director of Policy, Open Future (Netherlands)
  • Guillermo Hernandez – AI Policy Analyst, OECD
  • Sandrine Elmi Hersi – Unit Chief of “Open Internet”, ARCEP

The post Navigating the Future of Openness and AI Governance: Insights from the Paris Openness Workshop appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

Thursday, 30 January 2025

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — VIDEO: The Thunderbird Mobile Team

The Thunderbird Mobile team are crafting the newest chapter of the Thunderbird story. In this month’s office hours, we sat down to chat with the entire mobile team! This includes Philipp Kewisch, Sr. Manager of Mobile Engineering (and long-time Thunderbird contributor), and Sr. Software Engineers cketti and Wolf Montwé (long-time K-9 Mail maintainer and developer, respectively). We talk about the journey from K-9 Mail to Thunderbird for Android, what’s new and what’s coming in the near future, and the first steps towards Thunderbird on your iOS devices!

Next month, we’ll be chatting with Laurel Terlesky, Manager of the UI/UX Design Studio! She’ll be sharing her FOSDEM talk, “Thunderbird: Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable Open-Source Design System.” It’s been a while since we’ve chatted with the design team, and it will be great to see what they’re working on.

January Office Hours: The Thunderbird Mobile Team

In June 2022, we announced that K-9 Mail would be joining the Thunderbird family, and would ultimately become Thunderbird for Android. After two years of development, the first beta release of Thunderbird for Android debuted in October 2024, shortly followed by the first stable release. Since then, over 200 thousand users have downloaded the app, and we’ve gotten some very nice reviews in ZDNet and Android Authority. If you haven’t tried us on your Android device yet, now is a great time! And if, like some of us, you’re waiting for Thunderbird to come to your iPhone or iPad, we have some exciting news at the end of our talk.

Want to know more about the Android development process and find out what’s coming soon to the app? Want the first look into our plans for Thunderbird on iOS? Let our mobile team guests provide the answers!

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

We’re so grateful to Philipp, cketti, and Wolf for joining us! We hope this video helps explain more about Thunderbird on Android (and eventually iOS), and encourages you to download the app if you haven’t already. If you’re a regular user, we hope you consider contributing code, translations, or support. And if you’re an iOS developer, we hope you consider joining our team!

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Thunderbird for Android Resources:

The post VIDEO: The Thunderbird Mobile Team appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Mozilla L10N — 2025 Pontoon survey results

The results from the 2025 Pontoon survey are in and the 3 top-voted features we commit to implement are:

  1. Add ability to preview Fluent strings in the editor (258 votes).
  2. Keep unsaved translations when navigating to other strings (252 votes).
  3. Hint at any available variants when referencing message (229 votes).

The remaining features ranked as follows:

  1. Add virtual keyboard with special characters to the editor (226 votes).
  2. Link project names in Concordance search results to corresponding strings (223 votes).
  3. Add a batch action to pretranslate a selection of strings (218 votes).
  4. Add ability to edit and remove comments (216 votes).
  5. Enable use of generic machine translation engines with pretranslation (209 votes).
  6. Add ability to report comments and suggestions for abusive content (193 votes).
  7. Add “Copy translation from another locale as suggestion” batch action (186 votes).

We thank everyone who dedicated their time to share valuable responses and suggest potential features for us to consider implementing!

Each user could give each feature 1 to 5 votes. A total of 154 Pontoon users participated in the survey, 68 of which voted on all features. The number of participants is lower than in the past years, since we only reached out to users who explicitly opted-in to email updates.

We look forward to implementing these new features and working towards a more seamless and efficient translation experience with Pontoon. Stay tuned for updates!

Friday, 24 January 2025

Mozilla L10N — L10n report: January 2025 Edition

Please note some of the information provided in this report may be subject to change as we are sometimes sharing information about projects that are still in early stages and are not final yet. 

Welcome!

Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Tab Groups

Tab groups are now available in Nightly 136! To create a group in Nightly, all you have to do is have two tabs open, click and drag one tab to the other, pause a sec and then drop. From there the tab group editor window will appear where you can name the group and give it a color. After saving, the group will appear on your tab bar.

Once you create a group, you can easily access your groups from the overflow menu on the right.

 

These work great in the sidebar and vertical tabs feature that was released in the Firefox Labs feature in Nightly 131!

New profile selector

The new profile selector which we have been localizing over the previous months is now starting to roll out gradually to users in Nightly 136. SUMO has an excellent article about all the new changes which you can find here.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

AMO and AMO Frontend

The team is planning to migrate/copy the Spanish (es) locale into four: es-AR, es-CL, es-ES, and es-MX. Per the community managers’ input, all locales will retain the suggestions that have not been approved at the time of migration. Be on the lookout for the changes in the upcoming week(s).

Mozilla Accounts

The Mozilla accounts team recently landed strings used in three emails planned to be sent over the course of 90 days, with the first happening in the coming weeks. These will be sent to inactive users who have not logged in or interacted with the Mozilla accounts service in 2 years, letting them know their account and data may be deleted.

What’s new or coming up in SUMO

The CX team is still working on 2025 planning. In the meantime, read a recap from our technical writer, Lucas Siebert about how 2024 went in this blog post. We will also have a community call coming up on Feb 5th at 5 PM UTC. Check out the agenda for more detail and we’d love to see you there!

Last but not least, we will be at FOSDEM 2025. Mozilla’s booth will be at the K building, level 1. Would love to see you if you’re around!

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

New Email Features

We’re excited to announce two new email features that will keep you better informed and connected with your localization work on Pontoon:

Email Notifications: Opt in to receive notifications via email, ensuring you stay up to date with important events even when you’re away from the platform. You can choose between daily or weekly digests and subscribe to specific notification types only.

Monthly Activity Summary: If enabled, you’ll receive an email summary at the start of each month, highlighting your personal activity and key activities within your teams for the previous month.

Visit your settings to explore and activate these features today!

New Translation Memory tools are here!

If you are a locale manager or translator, here’s what you can do from the new TM tab on your team page:

  • Search, edit, and delete Translation Memory entries with ease.
  • Upload .TMX files to instantly share your Translation Memories with your team.

These tools are here to save you time and boost the quality of suggestions from Machinery. Dive in and explore the new features today!

Moving to GitHub Discussions

Feedback, support and conversations on new Pontoon developments have moved from Discourse to GitHub Discussions. See you there!

Newly published localizer facing documentation

Events

Come check out our end of year presentation on Pontoon! A Youtube link and AirMozilla link are available.

Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Contact us and we’ll include it.

Friends of the Lion

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact us and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve it.

Thursday, 23 January 2025

Mozilla Add-ons Blog — Announcing the WebExtensions ML API

Greetings extension developers!

We wanted to highlight this just-published blog post from our AI team where they share some exciting news – we’re shipping a new experimental ML API in Firefox that will allow developers to leverage our AI Runtime to run offline machine learning tasks in their web extensions.

Head on over to Mozilla’s AI blog to learn more. After you’ve had a chance to check it out, we encourage you to share feedback, comments, or questions over on the Mozilla AI Discord (invite link).

Happy coding!

The post Announcing the WebExtensions ML API appeared first on Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog.

Wednesday, 22 January 2025

SeaMonkey — Migrating to new update server…

Hi all,

As subjected, we’re migrating to a new Update server over the weekend (possibly even sooner)and while I have tested it a bit, nothing beats testing in production.  ;P

Seriously, though,  there’ll probably a bit of a hiccup (I have water), but shouldn’t be so terrible that we need to resort to returning to the old server.

Best regards,

:ewong

 

Monday, 13 January 2025

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest – December 2024

Happy New Year Thunderbirders! With a productive December and a good rest now behind us, the team is ready for an amazing year. Since the last update, we’ve had some successes that have felt great. We also completed a retrospective on a major pain point from last year. This has been humbling and has provided an important opportunity for learning and improvement.

Exchange Web Services support in Rust

Prior to the team taking their winter break, a cascade of deliverables passed the patch review process and landed in Daily. A healthy cadence of task completion saw a number of features reach users and lift the team’s spirits:

  • Copy to EWS from other protocol
  • Folder create
  • Enhanced logging
  • Local Storage
  • Save & manipulate Draft
  • Folder delete
  • Fix Edit Draft

Keep track of feature delivery here.

Account Hub

The overhauled Account Hub passed phase 1 QA review! A smaller team is handling phase 2 enhancements now that the initial milestone is complete. Our current milestone includes tasks for density and font awareness, refactoring of state management, OAuth prompts and more, which you can follow via Meta bug & progress tracking.

Global Database & Conversation View

Progress on the global database project was significant in the tail end of 2024, with foundational components taking shape. The team has implemented a database for folder management, including support for adding, removing, and reordering folders, and code for syncing the database with folders on disk. Preliminary work on a messages table and live view system is underway, enabling efficient filtering and handling of messages in real time. We have developed a mock UI to test these features, along with early documentation. Next steps include transitioning legacy folder and message functionality to a new “magic box” system, designed to simplify future refactoring and ensure a smooth migration without a disruptive “Big Bang” release.

Encryption

The future of email encryption has been on our minds lately. We have planned and started work on bridging the gap between some of the factions and solutions which are in place to provide quantum-resistant solutions in a post-quantum world. To provide ourselves with the breathing room to strategize and bring stakeholders together, we’re looking to hire a hardening team member who is familiar with encryption and comfortable with lower level languages like C. Stay tuned if this might be you!

In-App Notifications

With phase 1 of this project complete, we uplifted the feature to 134.0 Beta and notifications were shared with a significant number of users on both beta and daily releases in December. Data collected via Glean telemetry uncovered a couple of minor issues that have been addressed. It also provided peace of mind that the targeting system works as expected. Phase 2 of the project is well underway, and we have already uplifted some features and now merged them with 135.0 Beta.  Meta Bug & progress tracking.

Folder & Message Corruption

In the aftermath of our focused team effort to correct corruption issues introduced during our 2023 refactoring and solve other long-standing problems, we spent some time in self-reflection to perform a post mortem on the processes, decisions and situations which led to data loss and frustrations for users. While we regret a good number of preventable mistakes, it is also helpful to understand things outside of our control which played a part in this user-facing problem. You can find the findings and action plan here. We welcome any productive recommendations to improve future development in the more complex and arcane parts of the code.

New Features Landing Soon

Several requested features and fixes have reached our Daily users and include…

As usual, if you want to see things as they land, and help us squash some early bugs, you can always check the pushlog and try running daily, which would be immensely helpful for catching things early.

See you next month after FOSDEM!

—

Toby Pilling

Senior Manager, Desktop Engineering

The post Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest – December 2024 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Saturday, 11 January 2025

SeaMonkey — January 6th is a sad day to remember…

Dear All,

It is with very heavy hearts that we, at the SeaMonkey Project, announce the sudden passing of one of our core dev and releng, Bill Gianopoulos (aka WG9s) on the 6th January 2025.   Here is his obiturary (https://www.chesmorefuneralhome.com/obituaries/william-andrew-gianopoulos/20284/)

I wish there was something to say… but.. still stunned by this news.

R.I.P.  Bill!

:ewong

Tuesday, 7 January 2025

SeaMonkey — SeaMonkey 2.53.20 is out!

Hi All,

Firstly, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Healthy, Safe and Prosperous New Year!

Secondly,  the SeaMonkey Project is proud to announce the immediate release of SeaMonkey 2.53.20!

Please check out [1] and/or [2].

:ewong

PS: Updates forthcoming…

[1] – https://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/seamonkey2.53.20

[2] – https://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/2.53.20

Thursday, 2 January 2025

Mozilla L10N — Mozilla Localization in 2024

A Year in Data

2024 was a year with plenty of achievements for the Mozilla localization community (here’s the 2023 report in case you missed it, or want to check how we fared against our original plans). Let’s start with the numbers first:

  • 30 projects (-2 compared to last year) and 369 locales (+111) set up in Pontoon.
  • 4,991 new user registrations
  • 1,202 active users, submitting at least one translation (on average 222 users per month)
  • 466,187 submitted translations
  • 385,722 approved translations
  • 20,931 new strings to translate

While the overall number of projects decreased, this is mostly due to removal of obsolete projects (we actually added a new one in November). The astounding increase in the number of locales is driven once again by Common Voice, which has 318 locales enabled in Pontoon.

Thank you to all the volunteers who contributed their time, passion, and expertise to Mozilla’s localization over the last 12 months.

Pontoon Development

At the start of the year, we focused on improving Pontoon’s performance — a less glamorous but essential part of maintaining an effective platform: if the platform doesn’t perform well, users can quickly lose motivation and stop contributing. To assess the current state, we used the Apdex score, a standard measure of user satisfaction for web application performance. Between January and March, we successfully raised the average score for our lowest performing transactions from 0.77 to 0.87, making significant progress toward achieving what is considered a “good” performance level. Later in the year, we also moved to a larger database plan to further improve performance.

Animated GIF showing Pontoon's LLM integration in the machinery tab.In May, we launched our first LLM integration. Users now have additional options if they’re not satisfied with the suggestion provided by Google Translate. They can choose from three actions: Rephrase, to generate an alternative version; Make formal, to adjust the tone to a more formal register; and Make informal, to create a more casual version. These options are especially valuable for languages like German or Spanish, where tone can significantly impact translation quality and consistency.

Between May and December 2024, this feature has been used 2,571 times across 69 locales, with approximately 35% of the generated text being copied into the editor. This adoption rate suggests that the feature is delivering good-quality results and meeting user needs effectively, and that we should look into expanding its use.

Screenshot of Pontoon advanced search options.In October, we introduced advanced search options, giving users more flexibility and precision in finding the content they need. By default, Pontoon now searches through source text, approved translations, and pending suggestions. However, users still retain the option to expand their search to include identifiers, rejected translations, or further refine results by matching case or whole words.

For more details on how to use this feature, check out our documentation. We’re currently analyzing the usage data to understand if we should change the default options, and exploring how to make the feature more discoverable.

Screenshot of translation memory management in PontoonDecember was an especially busy month for releasing new features. We kicked things off with the long-awaited ability to edit translation memory (TM) entries, addressing one of the most frequently requested enhancements from our users. Shortly after, we introduced another powerful feature: the ability to upload custom translation memories in TMX format, giving locales even more control over their localization workflows.

Image showing achievement badges available in Pontoon.We also launched our first glimpse of gamification! Users can now earn three different types of badges for translating, reviewing, and promoting other contributors. The goal isn’t just to recognize and celebrate the invaluable efforts of volunteers but also to encourage positive behaviors. These include reviewing others’ work and promoting promising contributors, helping communities grow and encouraging effective participation across the platform.

Available user banners in Pontoon.As part of this work we also introduced user banners to help clarify roles within a locale or project.

Finally, we wrapped up the year by enhancing Pontoon’s ability to keep users informed. Users can now opt to receive notifications via email, choosing between daily or weekly updates. Additionally, we introduced a Monthly Activity Summary — a digest that highlights both their personal contributions and their team’s activity. If you’re a locale manager, we highly recommend enabling this feature to stay on top of your community’s progress and engagement.

Email options in Pontoon's profile settings.If you check your settings, you’ll find a new option for News and Updates. We highly encourage users to enable this checkbox to stay informed about online events, new features, surveys, and more. The content will be strictly focused on Mozilla Localization and Pontoon, and you can opt out or change your preferences at any time.

Lastly, a lot of work happened behind the scenes to improve Pontoon’s functionality and stability. We introduced the Messaging Center, a new feature that enables program managers to communicate with users more effectively through targeted notifications or emails.

In addition, we’ve been rewriting the code responsible for syncing Pontoon with repositories. This foundational work lays the groundwork for a broader set of initiatives planned for 2025. We also implemented measures to mitigate DDoS attacks, ensuring the platform remains stable, secure, and reliable for all users.

Community

This year, we collaborated with members of the community and other community-focused teams at Mozilla to improve our existing documentation and create comprehensive community guidelines aimed at building vibrant and sustainable communities. These guidelines address key topics, such as the expectations for managers and translators, and provide clear processes for assigning permissions to new contributors when existing leaders are not available.

Unfortunately, the situation around in-person community events hasn’t changed. We know how important these gatherings are for you — and for us — but in the meantime, we continued to focus on organizing online events. You can find all the recordings for the 2024 events here. We’ve also recorded an Introduction to Pontoon, designed to help onboard new contributors and familiarize them with the platform.

What’s coming in 2025

While we made significant strides in improving Pontoon’s performance this year, we believe that we’ve reached the limits of our current setup. As we move into the new year, our focus will shift to exploring alternative deployment solutions. Our goal is to make Pontoon faster, more reliable, and better equipped to meet the needs of our users.

We aim to make mobile projects (Android and iOS) first-class citizens in our localization ecosystem. The first step is introducing support for plural forms, which will significantly enhance the localizability of these projects. This improvement will enable more natural-sounding content in English and other languages, ensuring a better experience for both contributors and end users.

Talking about Pontoon, we’re committed to improving translation memory utilization, particularly for handling multi-value strings commonly found in Fluent. Currently, Pontoon only suggests translations for a single value within these strings. Moving forward, we aim to provide suggestions or translation memory matches for entire strings, ensuring a more comprehensive and efficient translation experience.

We plan to work on a Mozilla Language Portal — a unified hub that highlights Mozilla’s unique approach to localization while serving as a comprehensive resource for translators. This webpage will feature searchable translation memories, a rich repository of documentation, best practices, blogs, and more, fostering knowledge-sharing and collaboration across the global translation community.

Finally, we will continue exploring innovative ways to engage our community and strengthen its connections. As part of this work, we will keep advocating for increased investment in community building at the organization level, emphasizing its critical role in driving our mission forward.

If you have any thoughts or ideas about this plan, let us know on Mastodon or Matrix!

Thank you!

As we step into 2025, we’re constantly reminded of the transformative power of localization. Together, we’ll continue to break down barriers, and create a digital world that speaks everyone’s language. Thank you for being part of this journey.

Friday, 27 December 2024

SUMO Blog — Wrapping up 2024: How SUMO made support smarter, simpler, and more accessible

As 2024 comes to a close, we want to take a moment to celebrate the work we’ve accomplished together at Mozilla Support (SUMO). This year, we focused on making support resources easier to use, smarter to create, and better for everyone. From reducing users’ cognitive load to amplifying their voices through new programs, these wins are a testament to collaboration between our team, contributors, and the wider Mozilla community.

Let’s look back at the highlights.

Making support simpler for everyone

This year, we successfully kicked off the Cognitive Load Reduction initiative. The goal was clear: make Knowledge Base articles easier to follow and less mentally demanding for users. We introduced several improvements, including:

Right now, SUI screenshots and inline icons and images are the most widely adopted updates. These visual additions have already made a noticeable difference in helping users understand and solve issues faster. Next year, we will continue expanding these improvements to reach even more articles and provide a smoother experience for everyone.

One unified taxonomy to connect the dots

Another big milestone this year was the creation and implementation of a unified taxonomy across Mozilla’s Customer Experience team. A unified taxonomy is a shared structure for classifying things — in our case, everything from knowledge base content to app store feedback and user insights.

Here’s why it matters: With this new system, we can gather consistent and meaningful data about what our users need most. Whether it’s feedback about Firefox in app stores or trends in KB article usage, we’re now able to connect the dots between different channels. This deeper understanding helps us improve Mozilla’s products and continuously refine our support resources to be more useful and relevant.

Amplifying user voices with the Voice of Customer program

This year, we launched our Voice of Customer (VoC) program to ensure the voices of our users are consistently heard across Mozilla. We’re gathering feedback from multiple channels — like app store reviews, Connect, SUMO forums, and surveys — and sharing these insights with the teams that shape Mozilla’s products and support resources

To take this program even further, we’re customizing our own Gen-AI model to help cross-check user feedback across channels. This will allow us to identify trends more effectively and ensure the insights we share are accurate and actionable. By better connecting what users are saying with what we’re building, we can make Mozilla’s products and our support efforts even more aligned with user needs.

This is an ongoing effort, and we’re excited to see its continued impact in the coming year.

AI tools that make content smarter (and more accessible)

This year, we also explored how AI can improve the way we create, update, and localize content. Two major initiatives have already begun delivering results:

Organa Oracle for content creation and review

Organa Oracle is a custom GPT model built in Mozilla’s OpenAI Workspace, specifically designed to support SUMO’s style, voice, and guidelines. It helps streamline the creation and updating of Knowledge Base articles by:

  • Suggesting formats and approaches that align with SUMO guidelines.
  • Recommending screenshots and generating alt text to keep articles accessible to all users.
  • Reviewing drafts for clarity, tone, and consistency to ensure every article meets our standards.

For now, Organa Oracle is available only to staff, but we’re actively exploring ways to bring it and other similar tools to contributors in the future. These tools could make content creation and updates faster, easier, and even more collaborative while still reflecting the high quality and accessibility users expect from SUMO.

AI-powered L10N

At the same time, we’re using top large language models (LLMs), like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, with carefully designed prompts to assist in the localization process. These tools are built to respect existing translations while improving consistency and efficiency, especially in locales where fewer contributors are active. This initiative is designed to fill in gaps, improve consistency, and make localization more efficient for everyone.

Here’s what’s important: contributors will always be at the heart of our localization efforts. AI-powered localization is designed to support and amplify your work, not replace it. By speeding up the process and filling in gaps, the AI will help ensure more consistent translations and give contributors more time to focus on fine-tuning and reviewing content.

Together, these AI-driven tools are helping us create smarter, more accessible content and ensure users worldwide get the support they need.

Why this matters: Mozilla’s mission in action

At Mozilla, our work is guided by the Mozilla Manifesto, a promise to build an open and accessible internet that puts people first. Every initiative we worked on this year reflects that mission:

  • Reducing cognitive load makes support resources more inclusive, helping people of all skill levels solve problems with ease.
  • The Voice of Customer program ensures that user feedback actively shapes Mozilla’s products and support efforts.
  • Organa Oracle and our localization AI make content creation and translation faster while keeping accessibility, quality, and human collaboration at the center.

By simplifying and improving how we support users, we’re making it easier for everyone to feel confident and empowered on the web.

Thank you for an amazing year

None of this would have been possible without you, our incredible contributors, team members, and the wider Mozilla community. Your work, ideas, and feedback are what make SUMO a place where users can always find the help they need.

As we head into 2025, we are excited to keep building on this year’s progress. We will continue amplifying user voices, reducing complexity, improving accessibility, and exploring new ways to make support content even better.

Thank you for being part of this journey. Here is to another year of collaboration, growth, and making the internet better for everyone.

Let’s keep building a better web, one article at a time.

Tuesday, 24 December 2024

SeaMonkey — While 2.53.20b1 is out…

… I seem to be having some issues with the artifacts appearing in the releases.  Currently fixing.

:ewong

SeaMonkey — SeaMonkey 2.53.20 Beta 1 is out!

Hi All,

Firstly, on behalf of the SeaMonkey Project, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Secondly, the SeaMonkey project would like to announce the immediate release of SeaMonkey 2.53.20 Beta 1!

Please check out [1] and/or [2]!

[1] – https://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/seamonkey2.53.20

[2] – https://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/2.53.20b1

SeaMonkey — Updates issue

Hi all,

The update server has been flapping about like a trout out of water.   Been working on it and will be monitoring it.

My apologies.

 

:ewong

Friday, 20 December 2024

Mozilla L10N — Cast Your Vote for Pontoon’s 2025 Roadmap!

We’re shaping the future of Pontoon, and your input is crucial! As we plan our 2025 roadmap, we’re committed to implementing at least three of the features most important to you—our users. Now’s your chance to tell us what matters most.

Take the 2025 Survey

Help us prioritize features by January 6 by participating in this quick 5-minute survey. Here are the options up for vote:

  • Enable use of generic machine translation engines with pretranslation (details).
  • Add a batch action to pretranslate a selection of strings (details).
  • Add “Copy translation from another locale” batch action to simplify translation of similar locales (details).
  • Add ability to preview Fluent strings in the editor (details).
  • Hint at any available variants when referencing message (details).
  • Keep unsaved translations when navigating to other strings (details).
  • Add virtual keyboard with special characters to the editor, customizable per locale (details).
  • Link project names in Concordance search results to corresponding strings in translate view (details).
  • Add ability to edit and remove comments (details).
  • Add ability to report comments and suggestions for abusive content (details).

Note that at the end of the survey you will be able to add your own ideas, which you are always welcome to submit on GitHub.

Open Policy & Advocacy — Mozilla Joins Amicus Brief Supporting Software Interoperability

UPDATE – December 20, 2024

We won!

Earlier this week the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion that thoroughly rejects the district court’s dangerous interpretation of copyright law. Recall that, under the district court’s ruling, interoperability alone could be enough for new software to be an infringing derivative work of some prior software. If upheld, this would have threatened a wide range of open source development and other software.

The Ninth Circuit corrected this mistake. It wrote that “neither the text of the Copyright Act nor our precedent supports” the district court’s “interoperability test for derivative works.” It concluded that “mere interoperability isn’t enough to make a work derivative.” Adding that “the text of the Copyright Act and our case law teach that derivative status does not turn on interoperability, even exclusive interoperability, if the work doesn’t substantially incorporate the preexisting work’s copyrighted material.”

Original post, March 11, 2024

In modern technology, interoperability between programs is crucial to the usability of applications, user choice, and healthy competition. Today Mozilla has joined an amicus brief at the Ninth Circuit, to ensure that copyright law does not undermine the ability of developers to build interoperable software.

This amicus brief comes in the latest appeal in a multi-year courtroom saga between Oracle and Rimini Street. The sprawling litigation has lasted more than a decade and has already been up to the Supreme Court on a procedural question about court costs. Our amicus brief addresses a single issue: should the fact that a software program is built to be interoperable with another program be treated, on its own, as establishing copyright infringement?

We believe that most software developers would answer this question with: “Of course not!” But the district court found otherwise. The lower court concluded that even if Rimini’s software does not include any Oracle code, Rimini’s programs could be infringing derivative works simply “because they do not work with any other programs.” This is a mistake.

The classic example of a derivative work is something like a sequel to a book or movie. For example, The Empire Strikes Back is a derivative work of the original Star Wars movie. Our amicus brief explains that it makes no sense to apply this concept to software that is built to interoperate with another program. Not only that, interoperability of software promotes competition and user choice. It should be celebrated, not punished.

This case raises similar themes to another high profile software copyright case, Google v. Oracle, which considered whether it was copyright infringement to re-implement an API. Mozilla submitted an amicus brief there also, where we argued that copyright law should support interoperability. Fortunately, the Supreme Court reached the right conclusion and ruled that re-implementing an API was fair use. That ruling and other important fair use decisions would be undermined if a copyright plaintiff could use interoperability as evidence that software is an infringing derivative work.

In today’s brief Mozilla joins a broad coalition of advocates for openness and competition, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, iFixit, and the Digital Right to Repair Coalition. We hope the Ninth Circuit will fix the lower court’s mistake and hold that interoperability is not evidence of infringement.

The post Mozilla Joins Amicus Brief Supporting Software Interoperability appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

Thursday, 19 December 2024

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Open Source, Open Data: Visualizing Our Community with Bitergia

Thunderbird’s rich history comes with a complex community of contributors. We care deeply about them and want to support them in the best way possible. But how does a project effectively do just that? This article will cover a project and partnership we’ve had for most of a year with a company called Bitergia. It helps inform the Thunderbird team on the health of our community by gathering and organizing publicly available contribution data.


In order to better understand what our contributors need to be supported and successful, we sought the ability to gather and analyze data that would help us characterize the contributions across several aspects of Thunderbird. And we needed some data experts that understood open source communities to help us achieve this endeavor. From our relationship with Mozilla projects, we recalled a past partnership between Mozilla and Bitergia, who helped it achieve a similar goal. Given Bitergia’s fantastic previous work, we explored how Thunderbird could leverage their expertise to answer questions about our community. Likewise, you can read Bitergia’s complimentary blog post on our partnership as well.

Thunderbird and Bitergia Join Forces

Thunderbird and Bitergia started comparing our data sources with their capabilities. We found a promising path forward on gathering data and presenting it in a consumable manner. The Bitergia platform could already gather information from some data sources that we needed, and we identified functionality that had to be added for some other sources. 

We now have contribution data sets gathered and organized to represent these key areas where the community is active:

  • Thunderbird Codebase Contributions – Most code changes take place in the Mercurial codebase with Phabricator as the code reviewing tool.  This Mercurial codebase is mirrored in GitHub which is more friendly and accessible to contributors. There are other important Thunderbird repositories in GitHub such as Thunderbird for Android, the developer documentation, the Thunderbird website, etc.
  • Bug Activity – Bugzilla is our issue tracker and an important piece of the contribution story.
  • Translations – Mozilla Pontoon is where users can submit translations for various languages.
  • User Support Forums – Thunderbird’s page on support.mozilla.org is where users can request support and provide answers to help other users.
  • Email List Discussions – Topicbox is where mailing lists exist for various areas of Thunderbird. Users and developers alike can watch for upcoming changes and participate in ongoing conversations.

Diving into the Dashboards

Once we identified the various data sets that made sense to visualize, Bitergia put together some dashboards for us. One of the key features that we liked about Bitergia’s solution is the interactive dashboard. Anyone can see the public dashboards, without even needing an account!

All of our dashboards can be found here: https://thunderbird.biterg.io/

All of the data gathered for our dashboards was already publicly available. Now it’s well organized for understanding too! Let’s take a deeper look at what this data represents and see what insights it gives us on our community’s health.

Thunderbird Codebase Contributions

As stated earlier, the code contributions happen on our Mercurial repository, via the Phabricator reviewing tool. However, the Bitergia dashboard gathers all its data from GitHub, the Mercurial mirror pluss our other GitHub repositories. You can see a complete list of GitHub repositories that are considered at the bottom of the Git tab.

One of the most interesting things about the codebase contributions, across all of our GitHub repositories, is the breakdown of which organizations contribute. Naturally, most of the commits will come from people who are associated with Thunderbird or Mozilla. There are also many contributors who are not associated with any particular organization (the Unknown category).

One thing we hope to see, and will be watching for, is for the number of contributors outside of the Thunderbird and Mozilla organizations to increase over time. Once the Firefox and Thunderbird codebases migrate from Mercurial to git, this will likely attract new contributors and it will be interesting to see how those new contributions are spread across various organizations.

Another insightful dashboard is the graph that displays our incoming newcomers (seen from the Attracted Committers subtab). We can see that over the last year we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of people that have committed to our GitHub repositories for the first time. This is great news and a trend we hope to continue to observe!

Bug Activity

All codebases have bugs. Monitoring discovered and reported issues can help us determine not only the stability of the project itself, but also uncover who is contributing  their time to report the issues they’ve seen. Perhaps we can even run some developer-requested test cases that help us further solve the user’s issue. Bug reporting is incredibly important and valuable, so it is obviously an area we were interested in. You can view these relevant dashboards on the Bugzilla tab.

Translations

Many newcomers’ first contribution to an open source project is through translations.. For the Firefox and Thunderbird projects, Pontoon is the translation management system, and you can find the Translation contribution information on the Pontoon tab.

Naturally, any area of the project will see some oscillating contribution pattern for several reasons and translations are no different. If we look at the last 5 years of translation contribution data, there are several insights we can take away. It appears that the number of contributors drop off after an ESR release, and increase in a few chunks in the months prior to the release of the next ESR. In other words, we know that historically translations tend to happen toward the end of the ESR development cycle. Given this trend, If we compare the 115 ESR cycle (that started in earnest around January 2023) to the recent 128 ESR cycle (that started around December 2023), then we see far more new contributors, indicating a healthier contributor community in 128 than 115.

User Support Forums

Thus far we have talked about various code contributions that usually come from developers, but users supporting users is also incredibly important. We aim to foster a community that happily helps one another when they can, so let’s take a look at what the activity on our user support forums looks like in the Support Forums tab.

For more context, the data range for these screenshots of the user support forum dashboards has been set to the last 2 years instead of just the last year.

The good news is that we are getting faster at providing the first response to new questions. The first response is often the most important because it helps set the tone of the conversation.

The bad news is that we are getting slower at actually solving the new questions, i.e. marking the question as “Solved”. In the below graph, we see that over the last two years, our average time to mark an issue as “Solved” is affecting a smaller percentage of our total number of questions.

The general take away is that we need help in answering user support questions. If you are a knowledgeable Thunderbird user, please consider helping out your fellow users when you can.

Email List Discussions

Many open source projects use public mailing lists that anyone can participate in, and Thunderbird is no different. We use Topicbox as our mailing list platform to manage several topic-specific lists. The Thunderbird Topicbox is where you can find information on planned changes to the UI and codebase, beta testing, announcements and more. To view the Topicbox contributor data dashboard, head over to the Topicbox tab.

With our dashboards, we can see the experience level of discussion participants. As you might expect, there are more seasoned participants in conversations. Thankfully, less experienced people feel comfortable enough to chime in as well. We want to foster these newer contributors to keep providing their valuable input in these discussions!

Takeaways

Having collated public contributor data has helped Thunderbird identify areas where we’re succeeding. It’s also indicated areas that need improvement to best support our contributor community. Through this educational partnership with Bitergia, we will be seeking to lower the barriers of contribution and enhance the overall contribution experience.

If you are an active or potential contributor and have thoughts on specific ways we can best support you, please let us know in the comments. We value your input!

If you are a leader in an open source project and wish to gather similar data on your community, please contact Bitergia for an excellent partnership experience. Tell them that Thunderbird sent you!

The post Open Source, Open Data: Visualizing Our Community with Bitergia appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Wednesday, 18 December 2024

Open Policy & Advocacy — Mozilla Welcomes the Bipartisan House Task Force Report on AI

On December 17, the bipartisan House AI Task Force, led by Representatives Jay Obernolte and Ted Lieu, along with a number of other technology policy leaders, released their long awaited report on AI.

The House Task Force Report on Artificial Intelligence provides in-depth analysis and recommendations on a range of policy issues related to AI, including the use of AI in government agencies, data privacy, research and development, civil rights, and more. The report is the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of research and discussions between the Task Force and a broad range of stakeholders, including Nik Marda of Mozilla, who provided his insights to the Task Force on the benefits and risks of open-source and closed-source models. We thank the members of the House AI Task Force and their staff for their diligent work in developing a robust report and for their willingness to consult a broad range of stakeholders from across industry, civil society, and government. We look forward to working with the Task Force on next steps, and we hope to see legislation advanced to tackle these important issues.

See Mozilla’s December 17, 2024 statement below:

Mozilla commends the House AI Task Force for their diligent work over the past year and welcomes their report detailing AI policy findings and recommendations for Congress. We were grateful for the opportunity to engage with the Task Force throughout this process, and to contribute our perspective on our key priorities, including open source, protecting people from AI-related harms, and Public AI. It’s encouraging to see these critical topics addressed in the final report.

In particular, Mozilla agrees with the Task Force findings that there is insufficient evidence to justify the restriction of open source models, and that today’s open AI models actually “encourage innovation and competition.” This finding echoes NTIA’s July 2024 report which acknowledged the benefits of open models to promote AI innovation. We’re also gratified to see the report address other vital issues like data privacy as it pertains to AI, including the use of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). We’re pleased with the continued emphasis on making foundational progress towards Public AI as well, including recommendations to monitor the current National AI Research Resource Pilot in preparation for potentially scaling the program, which Mozilla hopes to see expanded, and investing in AI-related R&D and education.

In large part to its great breadth and depth, the House AI Task Force report represents a much-needed step forward in the development of concrete AI policy legislation and will help inform the agenda for the next Congress. We look forward to continuing working with AI leaders to advance meaningful AI legislation that promotes accountability, innovation, and competition.

The post Mozilla Welcomes the Bipartisan House Task Force Report on AI appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

Monday, 16 December 2024

about:community — Contributor spotlight – Mayank Bansal

In the open source world, there’s a saying that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” At Bugzilla, we’ve taken this principle to heart with our belief that “bugs are cheap” — a philosophy that transforms challenges into opportunities for collaborative problem-solving.

In this post, you will learn more about Mayank Bansal, whose journey embodies the true spirit of open source collaboration. For over a decade, Mayank has contributed across multiple aspects of Firefox development, including web performance. With his experience, he’s known for his exceptional skill in identifying the culprit of performance regression, and has even outpaced our automated alerting system! He’s also been recently appointed as the first official Community Performance Sheriff. Read on to uncover his insider tips and best practices for meaningful open source contributions.

Q: You’ve been a part of the Mozilla community since 2012. What initially inspired you to start contributing?

I have always been interested in software performance. I started using Firefox in 2009. Sometime in 2010-2011, Firefox announced it was working on graphics hardware acceleration, which was a novel technique then. That really piqued my interest. A developer who worked on the graphics backend for Firefox wrote a blog about the progress. I tested the Firefox beta builds on some graphic intensive websites and posted my findings on their blog. The developer responded to my comments and then filed a bug on Bugzilla to track it.

That was the moment when I realized that Mozilla is not your average faceless technology company. It had real developers, fixing real issues faced by real users.

I created my Bugzilla ID and commented on the bug the dev had filed. The devs responded there and fixed the bug. I could immediately test and perceive the improvement on the previously problematic webpage.

That was the positive feedback loop that got me hooked – I file performance bugs, the devs fix it (and thank me for filing the bug!)

Q: You’ve contributed across so many components: from JavaScript and Graphics to WebGPU and the DOM. How do you manage to stay on top of such a wide range of areas?

There are a few things I do:

  1. I go through all the bugs filed in the last 24 hours in the Core component, which gives me a sense of issues reported by other Firefox users, and bugs filed by the Mozilla devs to track work on either a new feature or performance improvement.
  2. I read through the bug review comments, which gives me an idea if a particular patch is expected to improve performance.
  3. I go through the try pushes from the developers, which gives me an idea of upcoming patches and changes.
  4. I have joined some of the chat rooms on Matrix that Mozilla developers use as team chats. These are generally open to the public (for responsible participation).

A good place to start would be to start cc’ing yourself to large meta bugs (which are like placeholders for other bugs). As new bugs get filed, they will get associated with the meta bug, and you will get an email notification. And then you can go through the new bug and follow that too.

Q: How do you approach bug triaging, and what are some of the challenges you face?

From the description of the bug by the reporter, I try to guess the component where it would sit (DOM, Style, Graphics, JS, etc.). Then I see if I can reproduce that bug. If I can, I will immediately perform a bisection using the wonderful mozregression tool. If I cannot reproduce it, I try to put it in the right component and cc a developer who works in that component.  All bugs get triaged as part of Mozilla’s regular process. But cc’ing a developer does cut short some of the lag associated with any process.

I have also been testing the fuzzing bugs created by Mozilla’s fuzzing team. Wherever I can reproduce a crash from the fuzzing testcase, I will perform a bisection and inform the developer. Again, all fuzz bugs get auto-bisected and triaged. But doing it manually cuts some of the time lag.

I also regularly test old bugs and close them if the original issue is fixed now. It feels right to close an old bug and declutter Bugzilla.

Challenges I face are when the details in the bug are not sufficient to reproduce, or when the issue is platform/setting specific, or when the testcase is private and the reporter cannot share. I will ask the reporter for extra information that will help the developers, and most of the time the reporters respond back!

Q: You’ve been known to find the culprit of performance regressions faster than the automated alerting system. What strategies do you use to efficiently track down regressions?

I use AWFY to track performance of Firefox on important metrics and benchmarks. This is a real-time dashboard maintained by the Perf-sheriffing team. As soon as a regression lands, the numbers change on the dashboard. The automated alert system needs minimum 12 datapoints before an alert is generated, which may take a few hours. In this interval, I identify the regression visually, zero-in on the potential range of bugs that could have caused the regression, and then based on my understanding identify a bug that caused the regression. I can then confirm my suspicion by triggering a build with only that bug and run the benchmark that regressed.

Note that the “bisect-build-run benchmark-create graph-generate perf alert” process is fully automated. I only need to press the right buttons, which makes my life very easy!

Q: With over a decade of contributions, how do you see Mozilla’s tools and technologies evolving, and what role do you hope to play in that future?

Tooling continues to evolve in Mozilla. For example, when I started, there wasn’t much source-code analysis. Now, multiple linters are run on each commit to the main repository. Mozilla as a company puts users at the forefront – and those users also include its internal development teams! There is a continuous push to improve tooling to make the developers more efficient and spend less time in mundane activities. The tooling around performance/regression monitoring, Crash Reporting, Telemetry, Build, Fuzzing is ever evolving. In the last few years, tooling around the use of machine learning has also increased.

I see my role as complementary to tools – filling gaps where the system cannot easily make a judgement, or connecting seemingly different bugs with little context.

Q: Through your testing, you’ve discovered bugs on the web where Firefox underperforms compared to other browsers. Can you share how you approach this type of testing?

I follow all the graphics related bugs. As soon as something lands in Nightly, I immediately start stress-testing websites. I also go to sites like Codepen.io and test literally hundreds of relevant demos.  Check out some of the bugs I filed for WebGPU and Canvas. With graphics, the issues usually are mis-rendering or crashes.

With Javascript, the issues I found tend to be where we are slower than other browsers, or where the javascript engine (SpiderMonkey) has some hidden quadratic behaviour. Crashes in Javascript are mostly from fuzzing testcases.

I also modify existing testcases or Codepen demos to make them intentionally unrealistic for the browser to process and then report issues. Kudos to the Mozilla devs who try to fix as much as they can and are always happy to analyse my testcases.

In general, if anything feels slow, file a bug. If any website looks weird, file a bug. The tenet in Bugzilla is “Bugs are cheap”.

Q: What advice would you give to new contributors who want to dive in?

Start with following bugs, reading Planet Mozilla, using Firefox Nightly, and installing the Firefox Profiler. Profiler is like an X-ray – you immediately get insight into what is slow in Firefox and where exactly. I spend a lot of time profiling webpages, demos, testcases. I profile anything and everything I find.

Q: What keeps you motivated to continue to contribute to Mozilla?

Couple of motivators:  The openness and transparency of development, extremely responsive and friendly developers, feeling of contributing to a piece of software that I use day in and out, belief that Mozilla is important to the openness and democratization of the Web, and finally that my bugs get analysed and fixed.

Q: Outside of your work on Mozilla, what do you enjoy doing in your free time?

Outside of Mozilla, I work within the Investment Banking industry as a transformation consultant in areas like risk, regulatory reporting, and capital markets.

In my free time, I like to read, cook, watch Netflix, and go on long drives with my friends and family.

Interested in contributing to performance tools like Mayank? Check out our wiki to learn more.

Friday, 13 December 2024

Mozilla Add-ons Blog — Developer Spotlight: Adaptive Tab Bar Color

A few years ago software developer Yixin Wang (aka Eason) decided he wanted to “de-Google” his digital life. After switching from Chrome to Firefox, Eason created macOS Monterey Safari Dark theme to mimic the look of Safari while experimenting with themes.

“During this process,” Eason explains, “I discovered that Firefox’s theme colors can be changed programmatically. That’s when it struck me — I could make Firefox dynamically adapt its theme color based on the web page it’s displaying, imitating Safari’s tab bar tinting behavior.”

This revelation led Eason to develop Adaptive Tab Bar Color, an extension that dynamically changes the color of Firefox’s tab bar to match the look of any website.

Upcoming v2.2 will feature a revamped Options page with modern HTML and CSS for a cleaner design. Users will also gain the ability to set a minimum contrast ratio for better UI readability.

While the concept may be simple, Adaptive Tab Bar Color’s development presented unique challenges. Eason understands that users expect his extension to seamlessly integrate colors of any web page they visit, but there are often unforeseeable edge cases. “What happens if a user always prefers dark mode, but the page has a bright color palette?” Eason wonders. “Or if a web page specifies a theme color that’s purely branding related and unrelated to content? What about pages with transparent backgrounds? Balancing these nuances to ensure a consistent and visually appealing experience has been both challenging and rewarding.”

Creating a cool extension like Adaptive Tab Bar Color can lead to unexpected benefits. After Eason put it on his resume, job recruiters came calling. This led to “… an incredible opportunity to write my Bachelor thesis at a company I’d always dreamed of working for. I’m so grateful for the support and enthusiasm of the Firefox community — it’s been an amazing journey.”

Do you have an intriguing extension development story? Do tell! Maybe your story should appear on this blog. Contact us at amo-featured [at] mozilla [dot] org and let us know a bit about your extension development journey.

The post Developer Spotlight: Adaptive Tab Bar Color appeared first on Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog.

Wednesday, 11 December 2024

Mozilla L10N — Celebrating Pontoon contributors with achievement badges

At the heart of Mozilla’s localization efforts lies Pontoon, our in-house translation management system. Powered by our vibrant volunteer community, Pontoon thrives on their commitments to submit and review translations across all our products.

As part of our ongoing attempts to further recognize the contributions of Pontoon’s volunteers, the localization team has been exploring new ways to celebrate their achievements. We know that the success of localization at Mozilla hinges on the dedication of our community, and it’s important to not only acknowledge this effort but to also create an environment that encourages even greater participation.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce achievement badges in Pontoon! Whether you’re new to Pontoon or a seasoned contributor, achievement badges not only recognize your contribution but also encourage participation and promote good habits amongst our community.

With achievement badges, we aim to make contributing to Pontoon more rewarding and fun while reinforcing Mozilla’s mission of building an open and accessible web for everyone, everywhere.

What are achievement badges?

Achievement badges are a symbol recognizing your hard work in keeping the internet accessible and open, no matter where users are located. These badges are displayed on your Pontoon profile page.

In collaboration with Mozillian designer Céline Villaneau, we’ve created three distinct badges to promote different behaviors within Pontoon:

  • Translation Champion, awarded for submitting translations.
  • Review Master, awarded for reviewing translations.
  • Community Builder, awarded for promoting users to higher roles.

Screenshot of the 3 types of badges displayed in the Pontoon profile.Receiving a badge

When the threshold required to receive a badge is crossed, you’ll receive a notification along with a pop-up tooltip (complete with confetti!). The tooltip will display details about the badge you’ve just earned.

Screencast of animation displayed when the user achieves the Translation Champion badge.To give you more of a challenge, each badge comes with multiple levels, encouraging continued contributions to Pontoon. You’ll receive similar notifications and celebratory tooltips whenever you unlock a new badge level.

Start collecting!

Badges are more than just icons — they’re a celebration of your dedication to keeping the web accessible to all. Ready to make your mark? All users will begin with a blank slate, so start contributing and begin your badge collection today!

Tuesday, 10 December 2024

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird for Android November 2024 Progress Report

The title reads "Thunderbird for Android November 2024 Progress Report' and has both the Thunderbird and K-9 Mail logos beneath it.

It’s been a while since our last update in August, and we’re glad to be back to share what’s been happening. Over the past few months, we’ve been fully focused on the Thunderbird for Android release, and now it’s time to catch you up. In this update, we’ll talk about how the launch went, the improvements we’ve made since then, and what’s next for the project.

A Milestone Achieved

Launching Thunderbird for Android has been an important step in extending the Thunderbird ecosystem to mobile users. The release went smoothly, with no hiccups during the Play Store review process, allowing us to deliver the app to you right on schedule.

Since its launch a month ago, the response has been incredible. Hundreds of thousands of users have downloaded Thunderbird for Android, offering encouragement and thoughtful feedback. We’ve also seen an influx of contributors stepping up to make their mark on the project, with around twenty people making their first contribution to the Thunderbird for Android and K-9 Mail repository since 8.0b1. Their efforts, along with your support, continue to inspire us every day.

Listening to Feedback

When we launched, we knew there were areas for improvement. As we’ve been applying our updates to both K-9 Mail and Thunderbird for Android, it won’t magically have all the bugs fixed with a new release over night. We’ve been grateful for the feedback in the beta testing group and the reviews, but also especially excited about those of you who spent a moment to appreciate by leaving a positive review. Your feedback has helped us focus on key issues like account selection, notifications, and app stability.

For account selection, the initial design used two-letter abbreviations from domain names, which worked for many users but caused confusion for users managing many similar accounts. A community contributor updated this to use letters from account names instead. We’re now working on adding custom icons for more personalization while keeping simple options available. Additionally, we resolved the confusing dynamic reordering of accounts, keeping them fixed while clearly indicating the active one.

Notifications have been another priority. Gmail users on K-9 faced issues due to new requirements from Google, which we’re working on. As a stop gap we’ve added a support article which will also be in the login flow from 8.2 onwards. Others have had trouble setting up push notifications or emails not arriving immediately, which you can read more about as well. Missed system error alerts have also been a problem, so we’re planning to bring notifications into the app itself in 2025, providing a clearer way to address actions.

There are many smaller issues we’ve been looking at, also with the help of our community, and we look forward to making them available to you.

Addressing Stability

App stability is foundational to any good experience, and we regularly look at the data Google provides to us. When Thunderbird for Android launched, the perceived crash rate was alarmingly high at 4.5%. We found that many crashes occurred during the first-time user experience. With the release of version 8.1, we implemented fixes that dramatically reduced the crash rate around 0.4%. The upcoming 8.2 update will bring that number down further.

The Year Ahead

The mobile team at MZLA is heading into well deserved holidays a bit early this year, but next year we’ll be back with a few projects to keep you productive while reading email on the go. Our mission is for you to fiddle less with your phone. If we can reduce the time you need between reading emails and give you ways to focus on specific aspects of your email, we can help you stay organized and make the most of your time. We’ll be sharing more details on this next year.

While we’re excited about these plans, the success of Thunderbird for Android wouldn’t be possible without you. Whether you’re using the app, contributing code, or sharing your feedback, your involvement is the lifeblood of this project.

If K-9 Mail or Thunderbird for Android has been valuable to you, please consider supporting our work with a financial contribution. Thunderbird for Android relies entirely on user funding, and your support is essential to ensure the sustainability of open-source development. Together, we can continue improving the app and building a better experience for everyone.

The post Thunderbird for Android November 2024 Progress Report appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Saturday, 7 December 2024

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Celebrating 20 Years of Thunderbird: Independence, Innovation and Community

Thunderbird turns 20 today. Such a huge milestone invites reflection on the past and excitement for the future. For two decades, Thunderbird has been more than just an email application – it has been a steadfast companion to millions of users, offering communication, productivity, and privacy.

20 Years Ago Today…

Thunderbird’s journey began in 2003, but version 1.0 was officially released on December 7, 2004. It started as an offshoot of the Mozilla project and was built to challenge the status quo – providing an open-source, secure and customizable alternative to proprietary email clients. What began as a small, humble project soon became the go-to email solution for individuals and organizations who valued control over their data. Thunderbird was seen as the app for those in the ‘know’ and carved a unique space in the digital world.

Two Decades of Ups and Downs and Ups

The path hasn’t always been smooth. Over the years, Thunderbird faced its share of challenges – from the shifting tides of technology and billion dollar competitors coming on the scene to troubles funding the project. In 2012, Mozilla announced that support for Thunderbird would end, leaving the project largely to fend for itself. Incredibly, a passionate group of developers, users, and supporters stepped up and refused to let it fade away. Twenty million people continued to rely on Thunderbird, believing in its potential, rallying behind it, and transforming it into a project fueled by its users, for its users.

In 2017, the Mozilla Foundation, which oversaw Thunderbird along with a group of volunteers in the Thunderbird Council, once again hired a small 3 person team to work on the project, breathing new life into its development. This team decided to take matters into their own hands and let the users know through donation appeals that Thunderbird needed their support. The project began to regain strength and momentum and Thunderbird once again came back to life. (More on this story can be found in our previous post, “The History of Thunderbird.”)

The past few years, in particular, have been pivotal. Thunderbird’s user interface got a brand new facelift with the release of Supernova 115 in 2023.  The 2024 Nebula release fixed a lot of the back-end code and technical debt that was plaguing faster innovation and development.  The first-ever Android app launched, extending Thunderbird to mobile users and opening a new chapter in its story. The introduction of Thunderbird Pro Services, including tools like file sharing and appointment booking, signals how the project is expanding to become a comprehensive productivity suite. And with that, Thunderbird is gearing up for the next era of growth and relevance.

Thank You for 20 Amazing Years

As we celebrate this milestone, we want to thank you. Whether you’ve been with Thunderbird since its earliest days or just discovered it recently, you’re part of a global movement that values privacy, independence, and open-source innovation. Thunderbird exists because of your support, and with your continued help, it will thrive for another 20 years and beyond.

Here’s to Thunderbird: past, present, and future. Thank you for being part of the journey. Together, let’s build what’s next.

Happy 20th, Thunderbird!

20 Years of Thunderbird Trivia!

It Almost Had a Different Name

Before Thunderbird was finalized, the project was briefly referred to as “Minotaur.” However, that name didn’t stick, and the team opted for something more dynamic and fitting for its vision.

Beloved By Power Users

Thunderbird has been a favorite among tech enthusiasts, system administrators, and privacy advocates because of its extensibility. With add-ons and customizations, users can tweak Thunderbird to do pretty much anything.

Supports Over 50 Languages

Thunderbird is loved world-wide! The software is available in more than 50 languages, making it accessible to users all across the globe.

Launched same year as Gmail

Thunderbird and Gmail both launched in 2004. While Gmail revolutionized web-based email, Thunderbird was empowering users to manage their email locally with full control and customization.

Donation-Driven Independence

Thunderbird relies entirely on user donations to fund its development. Remarkably, less than 3% of users donate, but their generosity is what keeps the project alive and independent for the other 97% of users.

Robot Dog Regeneration

The newly launched Thunderbird for Android is actually the evolution of the K-9 Mail project, which was acquired by Thunderbird in 2022. It was smarter to work with an existing client who shared the same values of open source, respecting the user, and offering customization and rich feature options.

The post Celebrating 20 Years of Thunderbird: Independence, Innovation and Community  appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Friday, 6 December 2024

Blog of Data — How do we preserve the integrity of business metrics while safeguarding our users privacy choice?

Abstract. Respecting our user’s privacy choices is at the top of our priorities and it also involves the deletion of their data from our Data Warehouse (DHW) when they request us to do so. For Analytics Engineering, this deletion presents the challenge to maintain business metrics reliable and stable along with the evolution of business analyses. This blog describes our approach to break through this challenge. Reading time: ~5 minutes.

Mozilla has a strong commitment to protecting user privacy and giving each user control over the information that they share with us. When the user’s choice is to opt-out of sending telemetry data, the browser sends a request that results in the deletion of the user’s records from our Data Warehouse. We call this process Shredder. The impact of Shredder is problematic when the reported key performance indicators (KPIs) and Forecasts change after a reprocess or “backfill” of data. This is a limitation to our analytics capabilities and the evolution of our products. Yet, running a backfill is a common process that remains essential to expand our business understanding, so the question becomes: how do we rise to this challenge? Shredder Mitigation is a strategy that breaks through this problem and resolves the impact in business metrics. Let’s see how it works with a simplified example. A table “installs” in the DWH contains telemetry data including the install id, browser and  channel utilized on given dates.

installs

date install_id browser channel
2021-01-01 install-1 Firefox Release
2021-01-01 install-2 Fenix Release
2021-01-01 install-3 Focus Release
2021-01-01 install-4 Firefox Beta
2021-01-01 install-5 Fenix Release

Derived from this installs table, there is an aggregate that stores the metric “kpi_installs”, which allows us to understand the usage per browser over time and improve accordingly, and that doesn’t contain any ID or channel information.

installs_aggregates_v1

date browser kpi_installs
2021-01-01 Firefox 2
2021-01-01 Fenix 2
2021-01-01 Focus 1
Total   5

  What happens when install-3 and install-5 opt-out of sending telemetry data and we need to backfill? This event results in the browser sending a deletion request, which Mozilla’s Shredder process addresses by deleting existing records of these installs along the DWH. After this deletion, the business asks us if it’s possible to calculate kpi_installs split by channel, to evaluate beta, nightly and release separately. This means that the channel needs to be added to the aggregate and the data be backfilled to recalculate the KPI. With install-3 and install-5 deleted, the backfill will report a reduced -thus, unstable- value for kpi_installs due to Shredder’s impact.

installs_aggregates (without shredder mitigation)

date browser channel kpi_installs
2021-01-01 Firefox Release 2
2021-01-01 Fenix Release 1
Total     3

  How do we solve this problem? The Shredder Mitigation process safely executes the backfill of the aggregate by recalculating the KPI using only the combination of previous and new aggregates data and queries, identifying the difference in metrics due to Shredder’s deletions and storing this difference as NULL. The process runs efficiently for terabytes of data, ensuring a 100% stability in reported metrics and avoiding unnecessary costs by running automated data checks for each subset backfilled. Every version of our aggregates that use Shredder Mitigation is reviewed to not contain any dimensions that could be used to identify previously deleted records. The result of a backfill with shredder mitigation in our example, is a new version of the aggregate that incorporates the requested dimension “channel” and matches the reported version of the KPI:

installs_aggregates_v2

browser channel kpi_installs
Firefox Release 1
Firefox Beta 1
Fenix Release 1
Fenix NULL 1
Focus NULL 1
Total   5

With the reported metrics stable and consistent, the shredder mitigation process enables the business to safely evolve, generating knowledge in alignment with our data protection policies and safeguarding our users’ privacy choice. Want to learn more? Head over to the shredder process technical documentation for a detailed implementation guide and hands-on insights.

Wednesday, 4 December 2024

hacks.mozilla.org — Introducing Uniffi for React Native: Rust-Powered Turbo Modules

Today Mozilla and Filament are releasing Uniffi for React Native, a new tool we’ve been using to build React Native Turbo Modules in Rust, under an open source license. This allows millions of developers writing cross-platform React Native apps to use Rust  – a modern programming language known for its safety and performance benefits to build single implementations of their app’s core logic to work seamlessly across iOS and Android. 

This is a big win for us and for Filament who co-developed the library with Mozilla and James Hugman, the lead developer. We think it will be awesome for many other developers too. Less code is good. Memory safety is good. Performance is good. We get all three, plus the joy of using a language we love in more places.

For those familiar with React Native, it’s a great framework for creating cross-platform apps, but it has its challenges. React Native apps rely on a single JavaScript thread, which can slow things down when handling complex tasks. Developers have traditionally worked around this by writing code twice – once for iOS and once for Android – or by using C++, which can be difficult to manage. Uniffi for React Native offers a better solution by enabling developers to offload heavy tasks to Rust, which is now easy to integrate with React Native. As a result, you’ve got faster, smoother apps and a streamlined development process.

How Uniffi for React Native works

Unifii for React Native is a uniFFI bindings generator for using Rust from React Native via Turbo Modules. It lets us work at an abstraction level high enough to stay focused on our applications’s needs rather than getting lost in the gory technical details of bespoke native cross-platform development  It provides tooling to generate:

  • Typescript and JSI C++ to call Rust from Typescript and back again
  • A Turbo-Module that installs the bindings into a running React Native library.

We’re stoked about this work continuing. In 2020, we started with Uniffi as a modern day ‘write once; run anywhere’ toolset for Rust. Uniffi has come a long way since we developed the technology as a bit of a hack to get us a single implementation of Firefox Sync’s core (in Rust) that we could then deploy to both our Android and iOS apps! Since then Mozilla has used uniffi-rs to successfully deploy Rust in mobile and desktop products used by hundreds of millions of users. This Rust code runs important subsystems such as bookmarks and history sync, Firefox Suggest, telemetry and experimentation. Beyond Mozilla, Uniffi is used in Android (in AOSP), high-profile security products and some complex libraries familiar to the community.

Currently the Uniffi for React Native project is an early release. We don’t have a cool landing page or examples in the repo (coming!), but open source contributor Johannes Marbach has already been sponsored by Unomed to use Uniffi for React Native to create a React Native Library for the Matrix SDK .

Need an idea on how you might give it a whirl? I’ve got two uses that we’re very excited about:

1) Use Rust to offload computationally heavy code to a multi-threaded/memory-safe subsystem to escape single-threaded JS performance bottlenecks in React Native. If you know, you know.

2) Leverage the incredible library of Rust crates in your React Native app. One of the Filament devs showed how powerful this is, recently. With a rudimentary knowledge of Rust, they were able to find a fast blurhashing library on crates.io to replace a slow Typescript implementation and get it running the same day. We’re hoping we can really improve the tooling even more to make this kind of optimization as easy as possible.

Uniffi represents a step forward in cross-platform development, combining the power of Rust with the flexibility of React Native to unlock new possibilities for app developers. 

We’re excited to have the community explore what’s possible. Please check out the library on Github and jump into the conversation on Matrix. 

Disclosure: in addition to this collaboration, Mozilla Ventures is an investor in Filament. 

 

The post Introducing Uniffi for React Native: Rust-Powered Turbo Modules appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog.

Tuesday, 3 December 2024

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest – November 2024

Hello Thunderbird Community! Another adventurous month is behind us, and the team has emerged victorious from a number of battles with code, quirks, bugs and performance issues. Here’s a quick summary of what’s been happening across the front and back end teams as some of the team heads into US Thanksgiving:

Exchange Web Services support in Rust

November saw an increase in the number of team members contributing to the project and to the number of features shipped! Users on our Daily release channel can help to test newly-released features such as copy and move messages from EWS to another protocol, marking a message as read/unread, and local storage functionality. Keep track of feature delivery here.

If you aren’t already using Daily or Beta, please consider downloading to get early access to new features and fixes, and to help us uncover issues early.

Account Hub

Development of a refreshed account hub has reached the end of an important initial stage, so is entering QA review next week while we spin up tasks for phase 2 – taking place in the last few weeks of the year. Meta bug & progress tracking.

Global Database & Conversation View

Work to implement a long term database replacement is moving ahead despite some team members being held up in firefighting mode on regressions from patches which landed almost a year ago. Preliminary patches on this large-scale project are regularly pumped into the development ecosystem for discussion and review, with the team aiming to be back to full capacity before the December break.

In-App Notifications

With phase 1 of this project now complete, we’ve uplifted the feature to 134.0 Beta and notification tests will be activated this week. Phase 2 of the project is well underway, with some features accelerated and uplifted to form part of our phase 1 testing plan.  Meta Bug & progress tracking.

Folder & Message Corruption

Some of the code we manage is now 20 years old and efforts are constantly under way to modernize, standardize and make things easier to maintain in the future. While this process is very rewarding, it often comes with unforeseen consequences which only come to light when changes are exposed to the vast number of users on our “ESR” channel who have edge cases and ways of using Thunderbird that are hard to recreate in our limited test environments.

The past few months have been difficult for our development team as they have responded to a wide range of issues related to message corruption. After a focused team effort, and help from a handful of dedicated users and saintly contributors, we feel that we have not only corrected any issues that were introduced during our recent refactoring, but also uncovered and solved problems that have been plaguing our users for years. And long may that continue! We’re here to improve things!

New Features Landing Soon

Several requested features have reached our Daily users and include…

If you want to see things as they land, and help squash early bugs, you can check the pushlog and try running daily. This would be immensely helpful for catching things early.

See you next month.

Toby Pilling

Senior Manager, Desktop Engineering

The post Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest – November 2024 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Thursday, 21 November 2024

Open Policy & Advocacy — Mozilla Responds to DOE’s RFI on the Frontiers in AI for Science, Security, and Technology (FASST)

This month, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE)  released a Request for Information on their Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security, and Technology (FASST) initiative. Mozilla was eager to provide feedback, particularly given our recent focus on the emerging conversation around Public AI.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) FASST initiative has the potential to create the foundation for Public AI infrastructure, which will not only help to enable increased access to critical technologies within the government that can be leveraged to create more efficient and useful services, but also potentially catalyze non-governmental innovation.

In addressing DOE’s questions outlined in the RFI, Mozilla focused on key themes including the myriad benefits of open source, the need to keep competition related to the whole AI stack top of mind, and the opportunity or FASST to help lead the development of Public AI by creating the program as “public” by default.

 

Below, we set out ideas in more depth. Mozilla’s response to DOE in full can be found here.

  • Benefits of Open Source: Given Mozilla’s long standing support of the open source community, a clear through line in Mozilla’s responses to DOE’s questions is the importance of open source in advancing key government objectives. Below are four key themes related to the benefits of open source:
    • Economic Security: Open source by its nature enables the more rapid proliferation of a technology and according to NTIA’s report on Dual-Use Foundation Models with Widely Available Model Weights, “They diversify and expand the array of actors, including less resourced actors, that participate in AI research and development.” For the United States, whose competitive advantage in global competition is its innovative private sector, the rapid proliferation of newly accessible technologies means that new businesses can be created on the back of a new technology, speeding innovation. Existing businesses, whether a hospital or a factory, can more easily adopt new technologies as well, helping to increase efficiency.
    • Expanding the Market for AI: While costs are rapidly decreasing, the use of cutting edge AI products purchased from major labs and big tech companies are not cheap. Many small businesses, research institutions, and nonprofits would be unable to benefit from the AI boom if they did not have the option to use freely available open source AI models. This means that more people around the world get access to American built open source technologies, furthering the use of American technology tools and standards, while forging deeper economic and technological ties.
    • Security & Safety: Open source has had demonstrable security and safety benefits. Rather than a model of “security through obscurity,” open source AI thrives from having many eyes examining code bases and models for exploits by harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to find issues, whether related to discriminatory outputs from LLMs or security vulnerabilities.
    • Resource Optimization: Open source in AI means more than freely downloadable model weights – it means considering how to make the entire AI stack more open and transparent, from the energy cost of training to data on the resources used to develop the chips necessary to train and operate AI models. By making more information on AI’s resource usage open and transparent, we can collectively work to optimize the efficiency of AI, ensuring that the benefits truly outweigh the costs.
  • Keep Competition Top of Mind: The U.S. government wields outsized influence in shaping markets as its role not just as a promulgator of standards and regulations but due to its purchasing power. We urge the DOE to consider broader competitive concerns when determining potential vendors and partnerships for products and services, ranging from cloud resources to semiconductors. This would foster a more competitive AI ecosystem, as noted in OMB’s guidance to Advance the Responsible Acquisition of AI in Government which highlights the importance of promoting competition in procurement of AI. The DOE should make an effort to work with a range of  partners and civil society organizations rather than defaulting to standard government partners and big tech companies.
  • Making FASST “Public” By Default: It is critical that as FASST engages in the development of new models, datasets, and other tools and resources, it defaults to making its work public by default. This may mean directly open sourcing datasets and models, or working with partners, civil society, academia, and beyond to advance access to AI assets which can provide public value.

We applaud DOE’s commitment to advancing open, public-focused AI, and we’re excited about the potential of the FASST program. Mozilla is eager to work alongside DOE and other partners to make sure FASST supports the development of technology that serves the public good. Here’s to a future where AI is open, accessible, and beneficial for everyone.

The post Mozilla Responds to DOE’s RFI on the Frontiers in AI for Science, Security, and Technology (FASST) appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Maximize Your Day: Make Important Messages Stand Out with Filters

For the past two decades, I’ve been trying to get on Jeopardy. This is harder than answering a Final Jeopardy question in your toughest subject. Roughly a tenth of people who take the exam get invited to auditions, and only a tenth of those who make it to auditions make it to the Contestant Pool and into the show. During this time, there are two emails you DON’T want to miss: the first saying you made it to auditions, and the second that you’re in the Contestant Pool. (This second email comes with your contestant form, and yes, I have my short, fun anecdotes to share with host Ken Jennings ready to go.)

The next time I audition, reader, I am eliminating refreshing my inbox every five minutes. Instead, I’ll use Thunderbird Filters to make any emails from the Jeopardy Contestant department STAND OUT.

Whether you’re hoping to be called up for a game show, waiting on important life news, or otherwise needing to be alert, Thunderbird is here to help you out.

Make Important Messages Stand Out with Filters

Most of our previous posts have focused on cleaning out your inbox. Now, in addition to showing you how Thunderbird can clear visual and mental clutter out of the way, we’re using filters to make important messages stand out.

  1. Click the Application menu button, then Tools. followed by Message Filters.
  2. Click New. A Filter Rules dialog box will appear.
  1. In the “Filter Name” field, type a name for your filter.
  2. Under “Apply filter when”, check one of the options or both. (You probably won’t want to change from the default “Getting New Mail” and “Manually Run” options.)
  3. In the “Getting New Mail: ” dropdown menu, choose either Filter before Junk Classification or Filter after Junk Classification. (As for me, I’m choosing Filter before Junk Classification. Just in case)
  4. Choose a property, a test and a value for each rule you want to apply:
  • A property is a message element or characteristic such as “Subject” or “From”
  • A test is a check on the property, such as “contains” or “is in my address book”
  • A value completes the test with a specific detail, such as an email address or keyword
  1. Choose one or more actions for messages that meet those criteria. (For extra caution, I put THREE actions on my sample filter. You might only need one!)
<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">(Note – not the actual Jeopardy addresses!)</figcaption>

Find (and Filter) Your Important Messages

Thunderbird also lets you create a filter directly from a message. Say you’re organizing your inbox and you see a message you don’t want to miss in the future. Highlight the email, and click on the Message menu button. Scroll down to and click on ‘Create Filter from Message.’ This will open a New Filter window, automatically filled with the sender’s address. Add any other properties, tests, or values, as above. Choose your actions, name your filter, and ta-da! Your new filter will help you know when that next important email arrives.

Resources

As with last month’s article, this post was inspired by a Mastodon post (sadly, this one was deleted, but thank you, original poster!). Many thanks to our amazing Knowledge Base writers at Mozilla Support who wrote our guide to filters. Also, thanks to Martin Brinkmann and his ghacks website for this and many other helpful Thunderbird guides!

Getting Started with Filters Mozilla Support article: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/organize-your-messages-using-filters

How to Make Important Messages Stick Out in Thunderbird: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/12/02/how-to-make-important-emails-stick-out-in-thunderbird/

The post Maximize Your Day: Make Important Messages Stand Out with Filters appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Wednesday, 13 November 2024

about:community — A tribute to Dian Ina Mahendra

It is with a heavy heart that I share the passing of my dear friend, Dian Ina Mahendra, who left us after a long battle with illness. Dian Ina was a remarkable woman whose warmth, kindness, and ever-present support touched everyone around her. Her ability to offer solutions to even the most challenging problems was truly a gift, and she had an uncanny knack for finding a way out of every situation.

Dian Ina’s contribution to Mozilla spanned back to the launch of Firefox 4 in 2011. She had also been heavily involved during the days of Firefox OS, the Webmaker campaign, FoxYeah, and most recently, Firefox Rocket (later renamed Firefox Lite) when it first launched in Indonesia. Additionally, she had been a dedicated contributor to localization through Pontoon.

Those who knew Dian Ina were constantly drawn to her, not just for her brilliant ideas, but for her open heart and listening ear. She was the person people turned to when they needed advice or simply someone to talk to. No matter how big or small the problem, she always knew just what to say, offering guidance with grace and clarity.

Beyond her wisdom, Dian Ina was a source of light and laughter. Her fun-loving nature and infectious energy made her the key person everyone turned to when they were looking for recommendations, whether it was for the best restaurant in town, a great book, or even advice on life itself. Her opinions were trusted, not only for their insight but also for the care she took in considering what would truly benefit others.

Her impact on those around her was immeasurable. She leaves behind a legacy of warmth, wisdom, and a deep sense of trust from everyone who had the privilege of knowing her. We will miss her dearly, but her spirit and the lessons she shared will live on in the hearts of all who knew her.

Here are some of the memories that people shared about Dian Ina:

  • Franc: Ina was a funny person, always with a smile. We shared many events like All Hands, Leadership Summit and more. Que la tierra te sea leve.

  • Rosana Ardila: Dian Ina was a wonderful human being. I remember her warm smile, when she was supporting the community, talking about art or food. She was independent and principled and so incredibly fun to be around. I was looking forward to seeing her again, touring her museum in Jakarta, discovering more food together, talking about art and digital life, the little things you do with people you like. She was so multifaceted, so smart and passionate. She left a mark on me and I will remember her, I’ll keep the memory of her big smile with me.
  • Delphine: I am deeply saddened to hear of Dian Ina’s passing. She was a truly kind and gentle soul, always willing to lend a hand. I will cherish the memories of our conversations and her dedication to her work as a localizer and valued member of the Mozilla community. Her presence will be profoundly missed.
  • Fauzan: For me, Ina is the best mentor in conflict resolution, design, art, dan L10n. She is totally irreplaceable in Indonesian community. We already missed her a lot.
  • William: I will never forget that smile and that contagious laughter of yours. I have such fond memories of my many trips to Jakarta, in large part thanks to you. May you rest in peace dearest Dian Ina.

  • Amira Dhalla: I’m going to remember Ina as the thoughtful, kind, and warm person she always was to everyone around her. We have many memories together but I specifically remember us giggling and jumping around together on the grounds of a castle in Scotland. We had so many fun memories together talking technology, art, and Indonesia. I’m saddened by the news of her passing but comforted by the Mozilla community honoring her in a special way and know we will keep her legacy alive.

  • Kiki: Mbak Ina was one of the female leaders I looked up to within the Mozilla Indonesia Community. She embodied all the definition of a smart and capable woman. The kind who was brave, assertive and above all, so fun to be around. I like that she can keep things real by not being afraid of sharing the hard truth, which is truly appreciative within a community setting. I always thought about her and her partner (Mas Mahen) as a fun and intelligent couple. Deep condolences to Mas Mahen and her entire family in Malang and Bandung. She left a huge mark on the Mozilla Indonesia Community, and she’ll be deeply missed.

  • Joe Cheng: I am deeply saddened to hear of Dian Ina’s passing. As the Product Manager for Firefox Lite, I had the privilege of witnessing her invaluable contributions firsthand. Dian was not only a crucial part of Mozilla’s community in Indonesia but also a driving force behind the success of Firefox Lite and other Mozilla projects. Her enthusiasm, unwavering support, and kindness left an indelible mark on everyone who met her. I fondly remember the time my team and I spent with her during our visit to Jakarta, where her vibrant spirit and warm smiles brought joy to our interactions. Dian’s positive energy and dedication will be remembered always, and her legacy will live on in the Mozilla community and beyond. She will be dearly missed.

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

about:community — Contributor spotlight – MyeongJun Go

The beauty of an open source software lies in the collaborative spirit of its contributors. In this post, we’re highlighting the story of MyeongJun Go (Jun), who has been a dedicated contributor to the Performance Tools team. His contributions have made a remarkable impact on performance testing and tooling, from local tools like Mach Try Perf and Raptor to web-based tools such as Treeherder. Thanks to Jun, developers are even more empowered to improve the performance of our products.

Open source has offered me invaluable lessons that are hard to gain elsewhere. Working with people from around the world, I’ve learned effective collaboration practices that help us minimize disruptions and improve development quality. From code reviews, writing test cases, to clean code and refactoring practices, I’ve gained essential skills for producing maintainable, high quality code.

Q: Can you tell us a little about how you first got involved with Mozilla?

I felt a constant thirst for development while working on company services. I wanted to create something that could benefit the world and collaborate with developers globally. That’s when I decided to dive into open source development.

Around that time, I was already using Firefox as my primary browser, and I frequently referenced MDN for work, naturally familiarizing myself with Mozilla’s services. One day, I thought, how amazing would it be to contribute to a Mozilla open source project used by people worldwide? So, I joined an open source challenge.

At first, I wondered, can I really contribute to Firefox? But thanks to the supportive Mozilla staff, I was able to tackle one issue at a time and gradually build my experience.

Q: Your contributions have had a major impact on performance testing and tooling. What has been your favourite or most rewarding project to work on so far?

I’ve genuinely found every project and task rewarding—and enjoyable too. Each time I completed a task, I felt a strong sense of accomplishment.

If I had to pick one particularly memorable project, it would be the Perfdocs tool. It was my first significant project when I started contributing more actively, and its purpose is to automate documentation for the various performance tools scattered across the ecosystem. With every code push, Perfdocs automatically generates documentation in “Firefox Source Docs”.

Working on this tool gave me the chance to familiarize myself with various performance tools one by one, while also building confidence in contributing. It was rewarding to enhance the features and see the resulting documentation instantly, making the impact very tangible. Hearing from other developers about how much it simplified their work was incredibly motivating and made the experience even more fulfilling.

Q: Performance tools are critical for developers. Can you walk us through how your work helps improve the overall performance of Mozilla products?

I’ve applied various patches across multiple areas, but updates to tools like Mach Try Perf and Perfherder, which many users rely on, have had a particularly strong impact.

With Mach Try Perf, developers can easily perform performance tests by platform and category, comparing results between the base commit (before changes) and the head commit (after changes). However, since each test can take considerable time, I developed a caching feature that stores test results from previous runs when the base commit is the same. This allows us to reuse existing results instead of re-running tests, significantly reducing the time needed for performance testing.

I also developed several convenient flags to enhance testing efficiency. For instance, when an alert occurs in Perfherder, developers can now re-run tests simply by using the “–alert” flag with the alert ID in the Mach Try Perf command.

Additionally, I recently integrated Perfherder with Bugzilla to automatically file bugs. Now, with just a click of the ‘file bug’ button, related bugs are filed automatically, reducing the need for manual follow-up.

These patches, I believe, have collectively helped improve the productivity of Mozilla’s developers and contributors, saving a lot of time in the development process.

Q: How much of a challenge do you find being in a different time zone to the rest of the team? How do you manage this?

I currently live in South Korea (GMT+9), and most team meetings are scheduled from 10 PM to midnight my time. During the day, I focus on my job, and in the evening, I contribute to the project. This setup actually helps me use my time more efficiently. In fact, I sometimes feel that if we were in the same time zone, balancing both my work and attending team meetings might be even more challenging.

Q: What are some tools or methodologies you rely on?

When developing Firefox, I mainly rely on two tools: Visual Studio Code (VSC) on Linux and SearchFox. SearchFox is incredibly useful for navigating Mozilla’s vast codebase, especially as it’s web-based and makes sharing code with teammates easy.

Since Mozilla’s code is open source, it’s accessible for the world to see and contribute to. This openness encourages me to seek feedback from mentors regularly and to focus on refactoring through detailed code reviews, with the goal of continually improving code quality.

I’ve learned so much in this process, especially about reducing code complexity and enhancing quality. I’m always grateful for the detailed reviews and constructive feedback that help me improve.

Q: Are there any exciting projects you’d like to work on?

I’m currently finding plenty of challenge and growth working with testing components, so rather than seeking new projects, I’m focused on my current tasks. I’m also interested in learning Rust and exploring trends like AI and blockchain.

Recently, I’ve considered ways to improve user convenience in tools like Mach Try Perf and Perfherder, such as making test results clearer and easier to review. I’m happy with my work and growth here, but I keep an open mind toward new opportunities. After all, one thing I’ve learned in open source is to never say, ‘I can’t do this.’

Q: What advice would you give to someone new to contributing?

If you’re starting as a contributor to the codebase, building it alone might feel challenging. You might wonder, “Can I really do this?” But remember, you absolutely can. There’s one thing you’ll need: persistence. Hold on to a single issue and keep challenging yourself. As you solve each issue, you’ll find your skills growing over time. It’s a meaningful challenge, knowing that your contributions can make a difference. Contributing will make you more resilient and help you grow into a better developer.

Q: What’s something you’ve learned during your time working on performance tools?

Working with performance tools has given me valuable experience across a variety of tools, from local ones like Mach Try Perf, Raptor, and Perfdocs to web based tools such as Treeherder and Perfherder. Not only have I deepened my technical skills, but I also became comfortable using Python, which wasn’t my primary language before.

Since Firefox runs across diverse environments, I learned how to execute individual tests for different conditions and manage and visualize performance test results efficiently. This experience taught me the full extent of automation’s capabilities and inspired me to explore how far we can push it.

Through this large scale project, I’ve learned how to approach development from scratch, analyze requirements, and carry out development while considering the impact of changes. My skills in impact analysis and debugging have grown significantly.

Open source has offered me invaluable lessons that are hard to gain elsewhere. Working with people from around the world, I’ve learned effective collaboration practices that help us minimize disruptions and improve development quality. From code reviews, writing test cases, to clean code and refactoring practices, I’ve gained essential skills for producing maintainable, high quality code.

Q: What do you enjoy doing in your spare time when you’re not contributing to Mozilla?

I really enjoy reading and learning new things in my spare time. Books offer me a chance to grow, and I find it exciting to dive into new subjects. I also prioritize staying active with running and swimming to keep both my body and mind healthy. It’s a great balance that keeps me feeling refreshed and engaged.

Interested in contributing to performance tools like Jun? Check out our wiki to learn more.

Friday, 8 November 2024

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — VIDEO: Q&A with Mark Surman

Last month we had a great chat with two members of the Thunderbird Council, our community governance body. This month, we’re looking at the relationship between Thunderbird and our parent organization, MZLA, and the broader Mozilla Foundation. We couldn’t think of a better way to do this than sitting down for a Q&A with Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Foundation.

We’d love to hear your suggestions for topics or guests for the Thunderbird Community Office Hours! You can always send them to officehours@thunderbird.org.

October Office Hours: Q&A with Mark Surman

In many ways, last month’s office hours was a perfect lead-in to this month’s, as our community and Mozilla have been big parts of the Thunderbird Story. Even though this year marks 20 years since Thunderbird 1.0, Thunderbird started as ‘Minotaur’ alongside ‘Phoenix,’ the original name for Firefox, in 2003. Heather, Monica, and Mark all discuss Thunderbird’s now decades-long journey, but this chat isn’t just about our past. We talk about what we hope is a a long future, and how and where we can lead the way.

If you’ve been a long-time user of Thunderbird, or are curious about how Thunderbird, MZLA, and the Mozilla Foundation all relate to each other, this video is for you.

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

We’re so grateful to Mark for joining us, and turning an invite during a chat at Mozweek into reality! We hope this video gives a richer context to Thunderbird’s past as it highlights one of the main characters in our long story.

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Thunderbird and Mozilla Resources:

The post VIDEO: Q&A with Mark Surman appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Thursday, 7 November 2024

SUMO Blog — Celebrating our top contributors on Firefox’s 20th anniversary

Firefox was built by a group of passionate developers, and has been supported by a dedicated community of caring contributors since day one.

The SUMO platform was originally built in 2007 to provide an open-source community support channel for users, and to help us collaborate more effectively with our volunteer contributors.

Over the years, SUMO has become a powerful platform that helps users get the most out of Firefox, provides opportunities for users to connect and learn more from each other, and allows us to gather important insights – all powered by our community of contributors.

SUMO is not just a support platform but a place where other like-minded users, who care about making the internet a better place for everyone, can find opportunities to grow their skills and contribute.

Our contributor community has been integral to Firefox’s success. Contributors humanize the experience across our support channels, champion meaningful fixes and changes, and help us onboard the next generation of Firefox users (and potential contributors!).

Fun facts about our community:

  • We’re global! We have active contributors in 63 countries.
  • 6 active contributors have been with us since day one (Shout outs to Cor-el, jscher2000, James, mozbrowser, AliceWyman, and marsf) and 16 contributors have been here for 15+ years!
  • In 2024*, our contributor community responded to 18,390 forum inquiries, made 747 en-US revisions and 5,684 l10n revisions to our Knowledge Base, responded to 441 Tweets, and issued 1,296 Play Store review responses (*from Jan-Oct 2024 for Firefox desktop, Android, and iOS. Non OP and non staff)

Screenshot of the top contributors from Jan-Oct 2024

Chart reflects top contributors for Firefox (Desktop, Android, and iOS)

Highlights from throughout the years:

Started in October 2007, SUMO has evolved in many different ways, but its spirit remains the same. It supports our wider user community while also allowing us to build strong relationships with our contributors. Below is a timeline of some key moments in SUMO’s history:

  • 2 October 2007 – SUMO launched on TikiWiki. Knowledge Base was implemented in this initial phase, but article localization wasn’t supported until February 2008.
  • 18 December 2007 – Forum went live
  • 28 December 2007 – Live chat launched
  • 5 February 2009 – SUMO logo was introduced
  • 11 October 2010 – We expanded to Twitter (now X) supported by the Army of Awesome
  • December 2010 – SUMO migrated from TikiWiki to Kitsune. The migration was done in stages and lasted most of 2010.
  • 14 March 2021 – We expanded to take on Play Store support and consolidated our social support platforms in Conversocial/Verint
  • 9 November 2024 – Our SUMO channels are largely powered by active contributors across forums, Knowledge Base and social

We are so grateful for our active community of contributors who bring our mission to life every day. Special thanks to those of you who have been with us since the beginning.

And to celebrate this milestone, we are going to reward top contributors (>99 contributions) for all products in 2024 with a special SUMO badge. Additionally, contributors with more than 999 contributions throughout SUMO’s existence and those with >99 contributions in 2024 will be given swag vouchers to shop at Mozilla’s swag stores.

Cheers to the progress we’ve made, and the incredible foundation we’ve built together. The best is yet to come!

 

P.S. Thanks to Chris Ilias for additional note on SUMO's history.

Open Policy & Advocacy — Join Us to Mark 20 Years of Firefox

You’re invited to Firefox’s 20th birthday!

 

We’re marking 20 years of Firefox — the independent open-source browser that has reshaped the way millions of people explore and experience the internet. Since its launch, Firefox has championed privacy, security, transparency, and put control back in the hands of people online.

Come celebrate two decades of innovation, advocacy, and community — while looking forward to what’s to come.

The post Join Us to Mark 20 Years of Firefox appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

Tuesday, 5 November 2024

Mozilla L10N — Thunderbird’s New Monthly Release Channel

We’re excited to announce that Thunderbird Desktop will soon offer monthly releases through the Release channel as a supported alternative to the ESR channel. This means a new major version of Thunderbird will be available every month, providing the following benefits for our users:

  • Frequent Feature Updates: New features will be available each month, rather than waiting for the annual Extended Support Release (ESR).
  • Smoother Transitions: Moving from one monthly release to the next will be less disruptive than updating between ESR versions.
  • Consistent Bug Fixes: Users will receive all available bug fixes, rather than relying on patch uplifts, as is the case with ESR.

Expanding Thunderbird’s Channels

Currently, Thunderbird offers three release channels: Daily, Beta, and ESR. With the addition of the Release channel, we’ll soon provide stable, monthly releases. Over time, this Release channel will become the default channel.

Current Status

The Thunderbird Release channel is currently available for testing purposes only. We have been publishing monthly releases for a few months now, and we will continue publishing new releases as we progress toward officially supporting the Thunderbird Release channel.

Translation Support

We are immensely grateful to our translators for their ongoing contributions in localizing Thunderbird. If you have any questions regarding translations for Thunderbird, please feel free to reach out to corey@thunderbird.net.

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: October 2024

Hello again Thunderbird Community! The last few months have involved a lot of learning for me, but I have a much better appreciation (and appetite!) for the variety of challenges and opportunities ahead for our team and the broader developer community. Catch up with last month’s update, and here’s a quick summary of what’s been happening across the different teams:

Exchange Web Services support in Rust

An important member of our team left recently and while we’ll very much miss the spirit and leadership, we all learned a lot and are in a good position to carry the project forwards. We’ve managed to unstick a few pieces of the backlog and have a few sprints left to complete work on move/copy operations, protocol logging and priority two operations (flagging messages, folder rename & delete, etc). New team members have moved past the most painful stages and have patches that have landed. Kudos to the patient mentors involved in this process!

QR Code Cross-Device Account Import

Thunderbird for Android launched this week, and the desktop client (Daily, Beta & ESR 128.4.0) now provides a simple and secure account transfer mechanism, so that account settings don’t have to be re-entered for new users of the mobile app. Download Thunderbird for Android from the Play store

Account Hub

Development of a refreshed account hub is moving forward apace and with the critical path broken down into sprints, our entire front end team is working to complete things in the next two weeks. Meta bug & progress tracking.

Clean up on aisle 2

In addition to our project work, we’ve had to be fairly nimble this month, with a number of upstream changes breaking our builds and pipelines. We get a ton of benefit from the platforms we inherit but at times it feels like we’re dealing with many things out of our control. Mental note: stay calm and focus on future improvements!

Global Database, Conversation View & folder corruption issues

On top of the conversation view feature and core refactoring to tackle the inner workings of thread-safe folder and message manipulation, work to implement a long term database replacement is well underway. Preliminary patches are regularly pumped into the development ecosystem for discussion and review, for which we’re very excited!

In-App Notifications

With phase 1 of this project now complete, we’ve scoped out additions that will make it even more flexible and suitable for a variety of purposes. Beta users will likely see the first notifications coming in November, so keep your eyes peeled. Meta Bug & progress tracking.

New Features Landing Soon

Several requested features are expected to debut this month (or very soon) and include…

As usual, if you want to see things as they land, and help us squash some early bugs, you can always check the pushlog and try running daily, which would be immensely helpful for catching things early.

See you next month.

Toby Pilling

Senior Manager, Desktop Engineering

The post Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: October 2024 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird for Android 8.0 Takes Flight

Just over two years ago, we announced our plans to bring Thunderbird to Android by taking K-9 Mail under our wing. The journey took a little longer than we had originally anticipated and there was a lot to learn along the way, but the wait is finally over! For all of you who have ever asked “when is Thunderbird for Android coming out?”, the answer is – today! We are excited to announce that the first stable release of Thunderbird for Android is out now, and we couldn’t be prouder of the newest, most mobile member of the Thunderbird family.

Resources

Thanks for Helping Thunderbird for Android Fly

Thank you for being a part of the community and sharing this adventure on Android with us! We’re especially grateful to all of you who have helped us test the beta and release candidate images. Your feedback helped us find and fix bugs, test key features, and polish the stable release. We hope you enjoy using the newest Thunderbird, now and for a long time to come!

The post Thunderbird for Android 8.0 Takes Flight appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Tuesday, 29 October 2024

SUMO Blog — Contributor spotlight – Michele Rodaro

Hi Mozillians,

In today’s edition, I’d like to introduce you all to Michele Rodaro, a locale leader for Italian in the Mozilla Support platform. He is a professional architect, but finding pleasure and meaning in contributing to Mozilla since 2006. I’ve met him on several occasions in the past, and reading his answers feels exactly like talking to him in real life. I’m sure you can sense his warmth and kindness just by reading his responses. Here’s a beautiful analogy from Michele about his contributions to Mozilla as they relate to his background in architecture:

I see my contribution to Mozilla a bit like participating in the realization of a project, the tools change but I believe the final goal is the same: helping to build a beautiful house where people feel comfortable, where they live well, where there are common spaces, but also personal spaces where privacy must be the priority.

Q: Hi Michele, can you tell us more about yourself and what keeps you busy these days?

I live in Gemona del Friuli, a small town in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, in the north-east of Italy, bordering Austria and Slovenia. I am a freelance architect, having graduated from Venice’s University many years ago. I own a professional studio and I mainly deal with residential planning, renovations, and design. In my free time I like to draw, read history, art, literature, satire and comics, listen to music, take care of my cats and, of course, translate or update SUMO Knowledge Base articles into Italian.

When I was younger, I played many sports (skiing, basketball, rugby, and athletics). When I can, I continue to go skiing in the beautiful mountains of my region. Oh, I also played piano in a jazz rock band I co-founded in the late 70s and early 80s (good times). In this period, from a professional point of view, I am trying to survive the absurd bureaucracy that is increasingly oppressive in my working environment. As for SUMO, I am maintaining the Italian KB at 100% of the translations, and supporting new localizers to help them align with our translation style.

Q: You get started with the Italian local forum in 2006 before you expand your contribution to SUMO in 2008. Can you tell us more about what are the different types of contributions that you’re doing for Mozilla?

I found out about Firefox in November 2005 and discovered the Mozilla Italia community and their support forum. Initially, I used the forum to ask for help from other volunteers and, after a short time, I found myself personally involved in providing online assistance to Italian users in need. Then I became a moderator of the forum and in 2008, with the help of my friend @Underpass, I started contributing to the localization of SUMO KB articles (the KB was born in that year). It all started like that.

Today, I am an Italian locale leader in SUMO. I take care of the localization of KB articles and train new Italian localizers. I continue to provide support to users on the Italian forums and when I manage to solve a problem I am really happy, but my priority is the SUMO KB because it is an essential source to help users who search online for an immediate solution to any problem encountered with Firefox on all platforms and devices or with Thunderbird, and want to learn the various features of Mozilla applications and services. Forum support has also benefited greatly from KB articles because, instead of having to write down all the procedures to solve a user’s problem every time, we can simply provide them with the link to the article that could solve the problem without having to write the same things every time, especially when the topic has already been discussed many times, but users have not searched our forum.

Q: In addition to translating articles on SUMO, you’re also involved in product translation on Pontoon. With your experience across both platforms, what do you think SUMO can learn from Pontoon, and how can we improve our overall localization process?

I honestly don’t know, they are quite different ways of doing things in terms of using translation tools specifically. I started collaborating with Pontoon’s Italian l10n team in 2014… Time flies… The rules, the style guides, and the QA process adopted for the Italian translations on Pontoon are the same ones we adopted for SUMO. I have to say that I am much more comfortable with SUMO’s localization process and tool, maybe because I have seen it start off, grow and evolve over time. Pontoon introduced Pretranslation, which helps a lot in translating strings, although it still needs improvements. A machine translation of strings that are not already in Pontoon’s “Translation Memory” is proposed. Sometimes that works fine, other times we need to correct the proposal and save it after escalating it on GitHub, so that in the future that translation becomes part of the “Translation Memory”. If the translation of a string is not accurate, it can be changed at any time.

I don’t know if it can be a solution for some parts of SUMO articles. We already have templates, maybe we should further implement the creation and use of templates, focusing on this tool, to avoid typing the translation of procedures/steps that are repeated identically in many articles.

Q: What are the biggest challenges you’re currently facing as a SUMO contributor? Are there any specific technical issues you think should be prioritized for fixing?

Being able to better train potential new localizers, and help infuse the same level of passion that I have in managing the Italian KB of SUMO. As for technical issues, staying within the scope of translating support articles, I do not encounter major problems in terms of translating and updating articles, but perhaps it is because I now know the strengths and weaknesses of the platform’s tools and I know how to manage them.

Maybe we could find a way to remedy what is usually the most frustrating thing for a contributor/localizer who, for example, is updating an article directly online: the loss of their changes after clicking the “Preview Content” button. That is when you click on the “Preview Content” button after having translated an article to correct any formatting/typing errors. If you accidentally click a link in the preview and don’t right-click the link to select “Open Link in New Tab” from the context menu, the link page opens replacing/overwriting the editing page and if you try to go back everything you’ve edited/translated in the input field is gone forever… And you have to start over. A nightmare that happened to me more than once often because I was in a hurry. I used to rely on a very good extension that saved all the texts I typed in the input fields and that I could recover whenever I wanted, but it is no longer updated for the newer versions of Firefox. I’ve tried others, but they don’t convince me. So, in my opinion, there should be a way to avoid this issue without installing extensions. I’m not a developer, I don’t know if it’s easy to find a solution, but we have Mozilla developers who are great ;)

Maybe there could be a way to automatically save a draft of the edit every “x” seconds to recover it in case of errors with the article management. Sometimes, even the “Preview Content” button could be dangerous. If you accidentally lost your Internet connection and didn’t notice, if you click on that button, the preview is not generated, you lose everything and goodbye products!

Q: Your background as a freelance architect is fascinating! Could you tell us more about that? Do you see any connections between your architectural work and your contribution to Mozilla, or do you view them as completely separate aspects of your life?

As an architect I can only speak from my personal experience, because I live in a small town, in a beautiful region which presents me with very different realities than those colleagues have to deal with in big cities like Rome or Milan. Here everything is quieter, less frenetic, which is sometimes a good thing, but not always. The needs of those who commission a project are different if you have to carry it out in a big city, the goal is the same but, urban planning, local building regulations, available spaces in terms of square footage, market requests/needs, greatly influence the way an architect works. Professionally I have had many wonderful experiences in terms of design and creativity (houses, residential buildings, hotels, renovations of old rural or mountain buildings, etc.), challenges in which you often had to play with just a centimeter of margin to actually realize your project.

Connection between architecture and contribution to Mozilla? Good question. I see my contribution to Mozilla a bit like participating in the realization of a project, the tools change but I believe the final goal is the same: helping to build a beautiful house where people feel comfortable, where they live well, where there are common spaces, but also personal spaces where privacy must be the priority. If someone wants our “cookies” and unfortunately often not only those, they have to knock, ask permission and if we do not want to have intrusive guests, that someone has to turn around, go away and let us do our things without sticking their nose in. This is my idea of ​​Mozilla, this is the reason that pushed me to believe in its values ​​(The user and his privacy first) and to contribute as a volunteer, and this is what I would like to continue to believe even if someone might say that I am naive, that “they are all the same”.

My duty as an architect is like that of a good parent, when necessary I must always warn my clients about why I would advise against certain solutions that I, from professional experience, already know are difficult to implement or that could lead to future management and functionality problems. In any case I always look for solutions that can satisfy my clients’ desires. Design magazines are beautiful, but it is not always possible to reproduce a furnishing solution in living environments that are completely different from the spaces of a showroom set up to perfection for a photo shoot… Mozilla must continue to do what it has always done, educate and protect users, even those who do not use its browser or its products, from those “design magazines” that could lead them to inadvertently make bad choices that they could regret one day.

Q: Can you tell us more about the Italian locale team in SUMO and how do you collaborate with each other?

First of all, it’s a fantastic team! Everyone does what they do best, there are those who help users in need on the forums, those who translate, those who check the translations and do QA by reporting things that need to be corrected or changed, from punctuation errors to lack of fluency or clarity in the translation, those who help with images for articles because often the translator needs the specific image for an operating system that he does not have.

As for translations, which is my main activity, we usually work together with 4- 5 collaborators/friends, and we use a consolidated procedure. Translation of an article, opening a specific discussion for the article in the forum section dedicated to translations with the link of the first translation and the request for QA. Intervention of anyone who wants to report/suggest a correction or a change to be made, modification, link to the new revised version based on the suggestions, rereading and if everything is ok, approval and publication. The translation section is public — like all the other sections of the Mozilla Italia forum — and anyone can participate in the discussion.

We are all friends, volunteers, some of us know each other only virtually, others have had the chance to meet in person. The atmosphere is really pleasant and even when a discussion goes on too long, we find a way to lighten the mood with a joke or a tease. No one acts as the professor, we all learn something new. Obviously, there are those like me who are more familiar with the syntax/markup and the tools of the SUMO Wiki and those who are less, but this is absolutely not a problem to achieve the final result which is to provide a valid guide to users.

Q: Looking back on your contribution to SUMO, what was the most memorable experience for you? Anything that you’re most proud of?

It’s hard to say… I’m not a tech geek, I don’t deal with code, scripts or computer language so my contribution is limited to translating everything that can be useful to Italian users of Mozilla products/programs. So I would say: the first time I reached the 100% translation percentage of all the articles in the Italian dashboard. I have always been very active and available over the years with the various Content Managers of SUMO. When I received their requests for collaboration, I did tests, opened bugs related to the platform, and contributed to the developers’ requests by testing the procedures to solve those bugs.

As for the relationship with the Mozilla community, the most memorable experience was undoubtedly my participation in the Europe MozCamp 2009 in Prague, my “first time”, my first meeting with so many people who then became dear friends, not only in the virtual world. I remember being very excited about that invitation and fearful for my English, which was and is certainly not the best. An episode: Prague, the first Mozilla talk I attended. I was trying to understand as much as possible what the speaker was saying in English. I heard this strange word “eltenen… eltenen… eltenen” repeated several times. What did it mean? After a while I couldn’t take it anymore, I turned to an Italian friend who was more expert in the topics discussed and above all who knew the English language well. Q: What the hell does “eltenen” mean? A: “Localization”. Q: “Localization???” A: “l10n… L ten n… L ocalizatio n”. Silence, embarrassment, damn acronyms!

How could I forget my first trip outside of Europe to attend the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, Canada in the summer of 2010? It was awesome, I was much more relaxed, decided not to think about the English language barrier and was able to really contribute to the discussions that we, SUMO localizers and contributors from so many countries around the world, were having to talk about our experience, try to fix the translation platform to make it better for us and discuss all the potential issues that Firefox was having at the time. I really talked a lot and I think the “Mozillians” I interacted with even managed to understand what I was saying in English :)

The subsequent meetings, the other All Hands I attended, were all a great source of enthusiasm and energy! I met some really amazing people!

Q: Lastly, can you share tips for those who are interested in contributing to Italian content localization or contributing to SUMO in general?

Every time a new localizer starts collaborating with us I don’t forget all the help I received years ago! I bend over backwards to put them at ease, to guide them in their first steps and to be able to transmit to them the same passion that was transmitted to me by those who had to review with infinite patience my first efforts as a localizer. So I would say: first of all, you must have passion and a desire to help people. If you came to us it’s probably because you believe in this project, in this way of helping people. You can know the language you are translating from very well, but if you are not driven by enthusiasm everything becomes more difficult and boring. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, if you don’t understand something ask, you’re among friends, among traveling companions. As long as an article is not published we can correct it whenever we want and even after publication. We were all beginners once and we are all here to learn. Take an article, start translating it and above all keep it updated.

If you are helping on the support forums, be kind and remember that many users are looking for help with a problem and often their problems are frustrating. The best thing to do is to help the user find the answer they are looking for. If a user is rude, don’t start a battle that is already lost. You are not obligated to respond, let the moderators intervene. It is not a question of wanting to be right at all costs but of common sense.

 

Friday, 25 October 2024

SUMO Blog — What’s up with SUMO – Q3 2024

Each quarter, we gather insights on all things SUMO to celebrate our team’s contributions and showcase the impact of our work.

The SUMO community is powered by an ever-growing global network of contributors. We are so grateful for your contributions, which help us improve our product and support experiences, and further Mozilla’s mission to make the internet a better place for everyone.

This quarter we’re modifying our update to highlight key takeaways, outline focus areas for Q4, and share our plans to optimize our tools so we can measure the impact of your contributions more effectively.

Below you’ll find our report organized by the following sections: Q3 Highlights at-a-glance, an overview of our Q4 Priorities & Focus Areas, Contributor Spotlights and Important Dates, with a summary of special events and activities to look forward to! Let’s dive right in:

Q3 Highlights at-a-glance

Forums: We saw over 13,000 questions posted to SUMO in Q3, up 83% from Q2. The increased volume was largely driven by the navigation redesign in July.

  • We were able to respond to over 6,300 forum questions, a 49% increase from Q2!
  • Our response rate was ~15 hours, which is a one-hour improvement over Q2, with a helpfulness rating of 66%.
  • August was our busiest and most productive month this year. We saw more than 4,300 questions shared in the forum, and we were able to respond to 52.7% of total in-bounds.
  • Trends in forum queries included questions about site breakages, account and data recovery concerns, sync issues, and PPA feedback.

Knowledge Base: We saw 473 en-US revisions from 45 contributors, and more than 3,000 localization revisions from 128 contributors which resulted in an overall helpfulness rating of 61%, our highest quarterly average rating YTD!

  • Our top contributor was AliceWyman. We appreciate your eagle eyes and dedication to finding opportunities to improve our resources.
  • For localization efforts, our top contributor was Michele Rodaro. We are grateful for your time, efforts and expert language skills.

Social: On our social channels, we interacted with over 1,100 tweets and saw more than 6,000 app reviews.

  • Our top contributor on Twitter this quarter was Isaac H who responded to over 200 tweets, expertly navigating our channels to share helpful resources, provide troubleshooting support, and help redirect feature requests to Mozilla Connect. Thank you, Isaac!
  • On the play store, our top contributor was Dmitry K who replied to over 400 reviews! Thank you for giving helpful feedback, advice and for providing such a warm and welcoming experience for users.

SUMO platform updates: There were 5 major platform updates in Q3. Our focus this quarter was to improve navigation for users by introducing new standardized topics across products, and update the forum moderation tool to allow our support agents to moderate these topics for forum posts. Categorizing questions more accurately with our new unified topics will provide us with a foundation for better data analysis and reporting.

We also introduced improvements to our messaging features, localized KB display times, fixed a bug affecting pageviews in the KB dashboard, and added a spam tag to make moderation work easier for the forum moderators.

We acknowledge there was a significant increase in spam questions that began in July which is starting to trend downwards. We will continue to monitor the situation closely, and are taking note of moderator recommendations on a future resolution. We appreciate your efforts to help us combat this problem!

Check out SUMO Engineering Board to see what the platform team is cooking up in the engine room. You’re welcome to join our monthly Community Calls to learn more about the latest updates to Firefox and chat with the team.

Firefox Releases: We released Firefox 128, Firefox 129 and Firefox 130 in Q3 and we made significant updates to our wiki template for the Firefox train release.

Q4 Priorities & Focus Areas

  • CX: Enhancing the user experience and streamlining support operations.
  • Kitsune: Improved article helpfulness survey and tagging improvements to help with more granular content categorization.
  • SUMO: For the rest of 2024, we’re working on an internal SUMO Community Report, FOSDEM 2025 preparation, Firefox 20th anniversary celebration, and preparing for an upcoming Community Campaign around QA.

Contributor Spotlights

We have seen 37 new contributors this year, with 10 new contributors joining the team this quarter. Among them, ThePillenwerfer, Khalid, Mozilla-assistent, and hotr1pak, who shared more than 100 contributions between July–September. We appreciate your efforts!

Cheers to our top contributors this quarter:

SUMO top contributors in Q3

Our multi-channel contributors made a significant impact by supporting the community across more than one channel (and in some cases, all three!) 

All in all it was an amazing quarter! Thanks for all you do.

Important dates

  • October 29th: Firefox 132 will be released
  • October 30th: RSVP to join our next Community Call! All are welcome. We do our best to create a safe space for everyone to contribute. You can join on video or audio, at your discretion. You are also welcome to share questions in advance via the contributor forum, or our Matrix channel.
  • November 9th: Firefox’s 20th Birthday!
  • November 14th Save the date for an AMA with the Firefox leadership team
  • FOSDEM ’25: Stay tuned! We’ll put a call out for volunteers and for talks in early November

Stay connected

Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback or recommendations on future features for this update, please reach out to Kiki and Andrea.

Thursday, 24 October 2024

Mozilla L10N — L10n report: October 2024 Edition

Please note some of the information provided in this report may be subject to change as we are sometimes sharing information about projects that are still in early stages and are not final yet. 

New community/locales added

We’re grateful for the Abzhaz community’s initiative in reaching out to localize our products. Thank you for your valuable involvement!

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Search Mode Switcher

A new feature in development has become available (behind a flag) with the release of the latest Nightly version 133: the Search Mode Switcher. You may have already seen strings for this land in Pontoon, but this feature enables you to enter a search term into the address bar and search through multiple engines. After entering the search term and selecting a provider, the search term will persist (instead of showing the site’s URL) and then you can select a different provider by clicking an icon on the left of the bar.

Firefox Search Mode Switcher

You can test this now in version 133 of Nightly by entering about:config in the address bar and pressing enter, proceed past the warning, and search for the following flag: browser.urlbar.scotchBonnet.enableOverride. Toggling the flag to true will enable the feature.

New profile selector

Starting in Version 134 of Nightly a new feature to easily select, create, and change profiles within Firefox will begin rolling out to a small number of users worldwide. Strings are planned to be made available for localization soon.

Sidebar and Vertical Tabs

Finally, as previously mentioned in the previous L10n Report, features for a new sidebar with expanded functionality along with the ability to change your tab layout from horizontal to vertical are available to test in Nightly through the Firefox Labs feature in your settings. Just go to your Nightly settings, select the Firefox Lab section from the left, and enable the feature by clicking the checkbox. Since these are experimental there may continue to be occasional string changes or additions. While you check out these features in your languages, if you have thoughts on the features themselves, we welcome you to share feedback through Mozilla Connect.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

AMO and AMO Frontend

To improve user experience, the AMO team plans to implement changes that will enable only locales meeting a specific completion threshold. Locales with very low completion percentages will be disabled in production but will remain available on Pontoon for teams to continue working on them. The exact details and timeline will be communicated once the plan is finalized.

Mozilla Accounts

Currently Mozilla Accounts is going through a redesign of some of its log-in pages’ user experiences. So we will continue to see small updates here and there for the rest of the year. There is also a planned update to the Mozilla Accounts payment sub platform. We expect to see a new file added to the project before the end of the year – but a large number of the strings will be the same as now. We will be migrating those translations so they don’t need to be translated again, but there will be a number of new strings as well.

Mozilla.org

The Mozilla.org site is undergoing a series of redesigns, starting with updates to the footer and navigation bars. These changes will continue through the rest of the year and beyond. The next update will focus on the About page. Additionally, the team is systematically removing obsolete strings and replacing them with updated or new strings, ensuring you have enough time to catch up while minimizing effort on outdated content.

There are a few new Welcome pages made available to a select few locales. Each of these pages have a different deadline. Make sure to complete them before they are due.

What’s new or coming up in SUMO

The SUMO platform just got a navigation redesign in July to improve navigation for users & contributors. The team also introduced new topics that are standardized across products, which lay the foundation for better data analysis and reporting. Most of the old topics, and their associated articles and questions, have been mapped to the new taxonomy, but a few remain that will be manually mapped to their new topics.

On the community side, we also introduced improvements & fixes on the messaging feature, changing the KB display time in format appropriate to locale, fixed the bug so we can properly display pageviews number in the KB dashboard, and add a spam tag in the list of question if it’s marked as spam to make moderation work easier for the forum moderators.

There will be a community call coming up on Oct 30 at 5pm UTC where we will be talking about Firefox 20th anniversary celebration and Firefox 132 release. Check out the agenda for more detail.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Enhancements to Pontoon Search

We’re excited to announce that Pontoon now allows for more sophisticated searches for strings, thanks to the addition of the new search panel!

When searching for a string, clicking on the magnifying glass icon will open a dropdown, allowing users to select any combination of search options to help refine their search. Please note that the default search behavior has changed, as string identifiers must now be explicitly enabled in search options.

Pontoon Enhanced Search Options

User status banners

As part of the effort to introduce badges/achievements into Pontoon, we’ve added status banners under user avatars in the translation workspace. Status banners reflect the permissions of the user within the respective locale and project, eliminating the need to visit their profile page to view their role.

Namely, team managers will get the ‘MNGR’ tag, translators get the ‘TRNSL’ tag, project managers get the ‘PM’ tag, and those with site-wide admin permissions receive the ‘ADMIN’ tag. Users who have joined within the last three months will get the ‘NEW USER’ tag for their banner. Status banners also appear in comments made under translations.

Screenshot of Pontoon showing the Translate UI, with user displaying the new banner for Manager and AdminNew Pontoon logo

We hope you love the new Pontoon logo as much as we do! Thanks to all of you who expressed your preference by participating in the survey.

Pontoon New Logo

Friends of the Lion

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact us and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve it.

Monday, 21 October 2024

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Maximize Your Day: Focus Your Inbox with ‘Grouped by Sort’

For me, staying on top of my inbox has always seemed like an unattainable goal. I’m not an organized person by nature. Periodic and severe email anxiety (thanks, grad school!) often meant my inbox was in the quadruple digits (!).

Lately, something’s shifted. Maybe it’s working here, where people care a lot about making email work for you. These past few months, my inbox has stayed if not manageable, then pretty close to it. I’ve only been here a year, which has made this an easier goal to reach. Treating my email like laundry is definitely helping!

But how do you get a handle on your inbox when it feels out of control? R.L. Dane, one of our fans on Mastodon, reminded us Thunderbird has a powerful, built-in tool than can help: the ‘Grouped by Sort’ feature!

Email Management for All Brains

For those of us who are neurodiverse, email management can be a challenge. Each message that arrives in your inbox, even without a notification ding or popup, is a potential distraction. An email can contain a new task for your already busy to-do list. Or one email can lead you down a rabbit hole while other emails pile up around it. Eventually, those emails we haven’t archived, replied to, or otherwise processed take on a life of their own.

Staring at an overgrown inbox isn’t fun for anyone. It’s especially overwhelming for those of us who struggle with executive function – the skills that help us focus, plan, and organize. A full or overfull inbox doesn’t seem like a hurdle we can overcome. We feel frozen, unsure where to even begin tackling it, and while we’re stuck trying to figure out what to do, new emails keep coming. Avoiding our inboxes entirely starts to seem like the only option – even if this is the most counterproductive thing we can do.

So, how in the world do people like us dig out of our inboxes?

Feature for Focus: Grouped by Sort

We love seeing R.L. Dane’s regular Thunderbird tips, tricks, and hacks for productivity. In fact, he was the one who brought this feature to our attention on a Mastodon post! We were thrilled when we asked if we could turn it to a productivity post and got an excited “Yes!” in response.

As he pointed out, using Grouped by Sort, you can focus on more recently received emails. Sorting by Date, this feature will group your emails into the following collapsible categories:

  • Today
  • Yesterday
  • Last 7 Days
  • Last 14 Days
  • Older

Turning on Grouped by Sort is easy. Click the message list display options, then click ‘Sort by.’ (In the top third, toggle the ‘Date’ option. In the second third, select your preferred order of Descending or Ascending. Finally, in the bottom third, toggle ‘Grouped by Sort.’

Now you’re ready to whittle your way through an overflowing inbox, one group at a time.

And once you get down to a mostly empty and very manageable inbox, you’ll want to find strategies and habits to keep it there. Treating your email like laundry is a great place to start. We’d love to hear your favorite email management habits in the comments!

Resources

ADDitude Magazine: https://www.additudemag.com/addressing-e-mail/

Dixon Life Coaching: https://www.dixonlifecoaching.com/post/why-high-achievers-with-adhd-love-and-hate-their-email-inbox

The post Maximize Your Day: Focus Your Inbox with ‘Grouped by Sort’ appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Wednesday, 16 October 2024

hacks.mozilla.org — Llamafile v0.8.14: a new UI, performance gains, and more

We’ve just released Llamafile 0.8.14, the latest version of our popular open source AI tool. A Mozilla Builders project, Llamafile turns model weights into fast, convenient executables that run on most computers, making it easy for anyone to get the most out of open LLMs using the hardware they already have.

New chat interface

The key feature of this new release is our colorful new command line chat interface. When you launch a Llamafile we now automatically open this new chat UI for you, right there in the terminal. This new interface is fast, easy to use, and an all around simpler experience than the Web-based interface we previously launched by default. (That interface, which our project inherits from the upstream llama.cpp project, is still available and supports a range of features, including image uploads. Simply point your browser at port 8080 on localhost).

llamafile

Other recent improvements

This new chat UI is just the tip of the iceberg. In the months since our last blog post here, lead developer Justine Tunney has been busy shipping a slew of new releases, each of which have moved the project forward in important ways. Here are just a few of the highlights:

Llamafiler: We’re building our own clean sheet OpenAI-compatible API server, called Llamafiler. This new server will be more reliable, stable, and most of all faster than the one it replaces. We’ve already shipped the embeddings endpoint, which runs three times as fast as the one in llama.cpp. Justine is currently working on the completions endpoint, at which point Llamafiler will become the default API server for Llamafile.

Performance improvements: With the help of open source contributors like k-quant inventor @Kawrakow Llamafile has enjoyed a series of dramatic speed boosts over the last few months. In particular, pre-fill (prompt evaluation) speed has improved dramatically on a variety of architectures:

  • Intel Core i9 went from 100 tokens/second to 400 (4x).
  • AMD Threadripper went from 300 tokens/second to 2,400 (8x).
  • Even the modest Raspberry Pi 5 jumped from 8 tokens/second to 80 (10x!).

When combined with the new high-speed embedding server described above, Llamafile has become one of the fastest ways to run complex local AI applications that use methods like retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

Support for powerful new models: Llamafile continues to keep pace with progress in open LLMs, adding support for dozens of new models and architectures, ranging in size from 405 billion parameters all the way down to 1 billion. Here are just a few of the new Llamafiles available for download on Hugging Face:

  • Llama 3.2 1B and 3B: offering extremely impressive performance and quality for their small size. (Here’s a video from our own Mike Heavers showing it in action.)
  • Llama 3.1 405B: a true “frontier model” that’s possible to run at home with sufficient system RAM.
  • OLMo 7B: from our friends at the Allen Institute, OLMo is one of the first truly open and transparent models available.
  • TriLM: a new “1.58 bit” tiny model that is optimized for CPU inference and points to a near future where matrix multiplication might no longer rule the day.

Whisperfile, speech-to-text in a single file: Thanks to contributions from community member @cjpais, we’ve created Whisperfile, which does for whisper.cpp what Llamafile did for llama.cpp: that is, turns it into a multi-platform executable that runs nearly everywhere. Whisperfile thus makes it easy to use OpenAI’s Whisper technology to efficiently convert speech into text, no matter which kind of hardware you have.

Get involved

Our goal is for Llamafile to become a rock-solid foundation for building sophisticated locally-running AI applications. Justine’s work on the new Llamafiler server is a big part of that equation, but so is the ongoing work of supporting new models and optimizing inference performance for as many users as possible. We’re proud and grateful that some of the project’s biggest breakthroughs in these areas, and others, have come from the community, with contributors like @Kawrakow, @cjpais, @mofosyne, and @Djip007 routinely leaving their mark.

We invite you to join them, and us. We welcome issues and PRs in our GitHub repo. And we welcome you to become a member of Mozilla’s AI Discord server, which has a dedicated channel just for Llamafile where you can get direct access to the project team. Hope to see you there!

 

The post Llamafile v0.8.14: a new UI, performance gains, and more appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog.

Friday, 11 October 2024

Web Application Security — Behind the Scenes: Fixing an In-the-Wild Firefox Exploit

At Mozilla, browser security is a critical mission, and part of that mission involves responding swiftly to new threats. Tuesday, around 8 AM Eastern time, we received a heads-up from the Anti-Virus company ESET, who alerted us to a Firefox exploit that had been spotted in the wild. We want to give a huge thank you to ESET for sharing their findings with us—it’s collaboration like this that keeps the web a safer place for everyone.

We’ve already released a fix for this particular issue, so when Firefox prompts you to upgrade, click that button. If you don’t know about Session Restore, you can ask Firefox to restore your previous session on restart.

The sample ESET sent us contained a full exploit chain that allowed remote code execution on a user’s computer. Within an hour of receiving the sample, we had convened a team of security, browser, compiler, and platform engineers to reverse engineer the exploit, force it to trigger its payload, and understand how it worked.

During exploit contests such as pwn2own, we know ahead of time when we will receive an exploit, can convene the team ahead of time, and receive a detailed explanation of the vulnerabilities and exploit. At pwn2own 2024, we shipped a fix in 21 hours, something that helped us earn an industry award for fastest to patch. This time, with no notice and some heavy reverse engineering required, we were able to ship a fix in 25 hours. (And we’re continually examining the process to help us drive that down further.)

While we take pride in how quickly we respond to these threats, it’s only part of the process. While we have resolved the vulnerability in Firefox, our team will continue to analyze the exploit to find additional hardening measures to make deploying exploits for Firefox harder and rarer. It’s also important to keep in mind that these kinds of exploits aren’t unique to Firefox. Every browser (and operating system) faces security challenges from time to time. That’s why keeping your software up to date is crucial across the board.

As always, we’ll keep doing what we do best—strengthening Firefox’s security and improving its defenses.

The post Behind the Scenes: Fixing an In-the-Wild Firefox Exploit appeared first on Mozilla Security Blog.

Thursday, 10 October 2024

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Contributor Highlight: Toad Hall

We’re back with another contributor highlight! We asked our most active contributors to tell us about what they do, why they enjoy it, and themselves. Last time, we talked with Arthur, and for this installment, we’re chatting with Toad Hall.

If you’ve used Support Mozilla (SUMO) to get help with Thunderbird, Toad Hall may have helped you. They are one of our most dedicated contributors, and their answers on SUMO have helped countless people.

How and Why They Use Thunderbird

Thunderbird has been my choice of email client since version 3, so I have witnessed this product evolve and improve over the years. Sometimes, new design can initially derail you. Being of an older generation, I appreciate it is not necessarily so easy to adapt to change, but I’ve always tried to embrace new ideas and found that generally, the changes are an improvement.

Thunderbird offers everything you expect from handling several email accounts in one location, filtering, address books and calendar, plus many more functionalities too numerous to mention. The built in Calendar with its Events and Tasks options is ideal for both business and personal use. In addition, you can also connect to online calendars.  I find using the pop up reminders so helpful whether it’s notifying you of an appointment, birthday or that a TV program starts in 15 minutes!  Personally, I particularly impressed that Thunderbird offers the ability to modify the view and appearance to suit my needs and preferences.

I use a Windows OS, but Thunderbird offers release versions suitable for Windows, MAC and Linux variants of Operating Systems. So there is a download which should suit everyone.  In addition, I run a beta version so I can have more recent updates, meaning I can contribute by helping to test for bugs and reporting issues before it gets to a release version.

How They Contribute

The Thunderbird Support forum would be my choice as the first place to get help on any topic or query and there is a direct link to it via the ‘Help’ > ‘Get Help’ menu option in Thunderbird. As I have many years of experience using Thunderbird, I volunteer my free time to assist others in the Thunderbird Support Forum which I find a very rewarding experience. I have also helped out writing some Support Forum Help Articles. In more recent years I’ve assisted on the Bugzilla forum helping to triage and report potential bugs. So, people can get involved with Thunderbird in various ways.

Share Your Contributor Highlight (or Get Involved!)

Thanks to Toad Hall and all our contributors who have kept us alive and are helping us thrive!

If you’re a contributor who would like to share your story, get in touch with us at community@thunderbird.net. If you want to get involved with Thunderbird, read our guide to learn about all the ways to contribute.

The post Contributor Highlight: Toad Hall appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Thursday, 3 October 2024

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: September 2024

Hello Thunderbird Community! I’m Toby Pilling, a new team member and I’ve spent the last couple of months getting up to speed, and have really enjoyed meeting the team and members of the community virtually, and some in person! September is now over (and so is the summer for many in our team), and we’re excited to share the latest adventures underway in the Thunderbird world. If you missed our previous update, go ahead and catch up! Here’s a quick summary of what’s been happening across the different teams:

Exchange

Progress continues on implementing move/copy operations, with the ongoing re-architecture aimed at making the protocol ecosystem more generic. Work has also started on error handling, protocol logging and a testing framework. A Rust starter pack has been provided to facilitate on-boarding of new team members with automated type generation as the first step in reducing the friction. 

Account Hub

Development of a refreshed account hub is moving forward, with design work complete and a critical path broken down into sprints. Project milestones and tasks have been established with additional members joining the development team in October. Meta bug & progress tracking.

Global Database & Conversation View

The team is focused on breaking down the work into smaller tasks and setting feature deliverables. Initial work on integrating a unique IMAP ID is being rolled out, while the conversation view feature is being fast-tracked by a focused team, allowing core refactoring to continue in parallel.

In-App Notification

This initiative will provide a mechanism to notify users of important security updates and feature releases “in-app”, in a subtle and unobtrusive manner, and has advanced at break-neck speed with impressive collaboration across each discipline. Despite some last-minute scope creep, the team has moved swiftly into the testing phase with an October release in mind. Meta Bug & progress tracking.

Source Docs Clean-up

Work continues on source documentation clean-up, with support from the release management team who had to reshape some of our documentation toolset. The completion of this project will move much of the developer documentation closer to the actual code which will make things much easier to maintain moving forwards. Stay tuned for updates to this in the coming week and follow progress here.

Account Cross-Device Import

As the launch date for Thunderbird for Android gets closer, we’re preparing a feature in the desktop client which will provide a simple and secure account transfer mechanism, so that account settings don’t have to be re-entered for new users of the Android client. A functional prototype was delivered quickly. Now that design work is complete, the project entered the 2 final sprints this week. Keep track here.

Battling OAuth Changes

As both Microsoft and Google update their OAuth support and URLs, the team has been working hard to minimize the effect of these changes on our users. Extended logging in Daily will allow for better monitoring and issue resolution as these updates roll out.

New Features Landing Soon

Several requested features are expected to debut this month or very soon:

As usual, if you want to see things as they land you can check the pushlog and try running daily. This would be immensely helpful for catching bugs early.

See ya next month.

Toby Pilling
Sr. Manager, Desktop Engineering

The post Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: September 2024 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Wednesday, 2 October 2024

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — State Of The Bird: Thunderbird Annual Report 2023-2024

We’ve just released Thunderbird version 128, codenamed “Nebula”, our yearly stable release. So with that big milestone done, I wanted to take a moment and tell our community about the state of Thunderbird. In the past I’ve done a recap focused solely on the project’s financials, which is interesting – but doesn’t capture all of the great work that the project has accomplished. So, this time, I’m going to try something different. I give you the State of the Bird: Thunderbird Annual Report 2023-2024.

Before we jump into it, on behalf of the Thunderbird Team and Council, I wanted to extend our deepest gratitude to the hundreds of thousands of people who generously provided financial support to Thunderbird this past year. Additionally, Thunderbird would like to thank the many volunteers who contributed their time to our many efforts. It is not an exaggeration to say that this product would not exist without them. All of our contributors are the lifeblood of Thunderbird. They are the beacons shining brightly to remind us of the transformative power of open source, and the influence of the community that stands alongside it. Thank you for not just being on this journey with us, but for making the journey possible.

Supernova & Nebula

Thunderbird Supernova 115 blazed into existence on July 11, 2023. This Extended Support Release (ESR) not only introduced cool code names for releases, but also helped bring Thunderbird a modern look and experience that matched the expectation of users in 2023. In addition to shedding our outdated image, we also started tackling something which prevented a brisk development pace and steady introduction of new features: two decades of technical debt.

After three years of slow decline in Daily Active Users (DAUs), the Supernova release started a noticeable upward trend, which reaffirms that the changes we made in this release are putting us on the right track. What our users were responding to wasn’t just visual, however. As we’ve noted many times before – Supernova was also a very large architectural overhaul that saw the cleanup of decades of technical debt for the mail front-end. Supernova delivered a revamped, customizable mail experience that also gave us a solid foundation to build the future on.

Fast forwarding to Nebula, released on July 11, 2024, we built upon many of the pillars that made Supernova a success. We improved the look and feel, usability, customization and speed of the mail experience in truly substantial ways. Additionally, many of the investments in improving the Thunderbird codebase began to pay dividends, allowing us to roll in preliminary Exchange support and use native OS notifications.

All of the work that has happened with Supernova and Nebula is an effort to make Thunderbird a first-class email and productivity tool in its own right. We’ve spent years paying down technical debt so that we could focus more on the features and improvements that bring value to our users. This past year we got to leverage all that hard work to create a truly great Thunderbird experience.

K-9 Mail & Thunderbird For Android

In response to the enormous demand for Thunderbird on a phone, we’ve worked hard to lay a solid foundation for our Android release. The effort to turn K-9 Mail into something we can confidently call a great Thunderbird experience on-the-go is coming along nicely.

In April of 2023, we released K-9 6.600 with a message view redesign that brought K-9 and Thunderbird more in line. This release also had a more polished UI, among other fixes, improvements, and changes. Additionally, it integrated our new design system with reusable components that will allow quicker responses to future design changes in Android.

The 6.7xx Beta series, developed throughout 2023, primarily focused on improving account setup. The main reason for this change is to enable seamless email account setup. This also started the transition of K-9’s UI from traditional Android XML layouts to using the more modern and now recommended Jetpack Compose UI toolkit, and the adoption of Atomic Design principles for a cohesive, intuitive design. The 6.710 Beta release in August was the first to include the new account setup for more widespread testing. Introducing new account setup code and removing some of the old code was a step in the right direction.

In other significant events of 2023, we hired Wolf Montwé as a senior software engineer, doubling the K-9 Mail team at MZLA! We also conducted a security audit with 7ASecurity and OSTIF. No critical issues were found, and many non-critical issues were fixed. We began experimenting with Material 3 and based on positive results, decided to switch to Material 3 before renaming the app. Encouraged by our community contributors, we moved to Weblate for localization. Weblate is better integrated into K-9 and is open source. Some of our time was also spent on necessary maintenance to ensure the app works properly on the latest Android versions.

So far this year, we’ve shipped the account setup improvements to everyone and continued work on Material 3 and polishing the app in preparation for its transition to “Thunderbird for Android.” You can look at individual release details in our GitHub repository and track the progress we’ve made there. Suffice to say, the work on creating an amazing Android experience has been significant – and we look forward to sharing the first true Thunderbird release on Android in the next few months.

Services and  Infrastructure

In 2023 we began working in earnest on delivering additional value to Thunderbird users through a suite of web services. The reasoning? There are some features that would add significant value to our users that we simply can’t do in the Thunderbird clients alone. We can, however, create amazing, open source, privacy-respecting services that enhance the Thunderbird experience while aligning with our values – and that’s what we’ve been doing.

The services that we’ve focused on are: Appointment, a calendar scheduling tool; Send, an encrypted large-file transfer service; and Thunderbird Sync, which will allow users to sync their Thunderbird settings between devices (both desktop and Android).

Thunderbird Appointment enables you to plan less and do more. You can add your calendars to the service, outline your weekly availability and then send links that allow others to grab time on your schedule. No more long back-and-forth email threads to find a time to meet, just send a link. We’ve just opened up beta testing for the service and look forward to hearing from early users what features our users would like to see. For more information on Thunderbird Appointment, and if you’d like to sign up to be a beta tester, check out our Thunderbird Appointment blog post. If you want to look at the code, check out the repository for the project on GitHub.

The Thunderbird team was very sad when Firefox Send was shut down. Firefox Send made it possible to send large files easily, maybe easier than any other tool on the Internet. So we’re reviving it, but not without some nice improvements. Thunderbird Send will not only allow you to send large files easily, but our version also encrypts them. All files that go through Send are encrypted, so even we can’t see what you share on the service. This privacy focus was important in building this tool because it’s one of our core values, spelled out in the Mozilla Manifesto (principle 4): “Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.”

Finally, after many requests for this feature, I’m happy to share that we are working hard to make Thunderbird Sync available to everyone. Thunderbird Sync will allow you to sync your account and application settings between Thunderbird clients, saving time at setup and headaches when you use Thunderbird on multiple devices. We look forward to sharing more on this front in the near future.

2023 Financial Picture

All of the above work was made possible because of our passionate community of Thunderbird users. 2023 was a year of significant investment into our team and our infrastructure, designed to ensure the continued long-term stability and sustainability of Thunderbird. As previously mentioned these investments would not have been possible without the remarkable generosity of our financial contributors.

Contribution Revenue

Total financial contributions in 2023 reached $8.6M, reflecting a 34.5% increase over 2022. More than 515,000 transactions from over 300,000 individual contributors generated this financial support (26% of the transactions were recurring monthly contributions).

In addition to that incredible total, what stands out is that the majority of our contributions were modest. The average contribution amount was $16.90, and the median amount was $11.12.

We are often asked if we have “super givers” and the refreshing answer is “no, we simply have a super community.” To underscore this, consider that 61% of giving was $20 or less, and 95% of the transactions were $35 or less. The number of transactions $1000 and above accounted for only 56 transactions; that’s effectively 0.0007% of all contribution transactions.

And this super community helping us sustain and improve Thunderbird is very much a global one, with contributions pouring in from more than 200 countries! The top five giving countries — Germany, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan — accounted for 63% of our contribution revenue and 50% of transactions. We believe this global support is a testament to the universal value of Thunderbird and the core values the project stands for.

Expenses

Now, let’s talk about how we’re using these funds to keep Thunderbird thriving well into the future. 

As with most organizations, employee-related expenses are the largest expense category. The second highest category for us are all the costs associated with distributing Thunderbird to tens of millions of users and the operations that help make that happen. You can see our spending across all categories below:

The Importance of Supporting Thunderbird

When I started at Thunderbird (in 2017), we weren’t on a sustainable path. The cost of building, maintaining and distributing Thunderbird to tens of millions of people was too great when compared against the financial contributions we had coming in. Fast forward to 2023 and we’re able to not only deliver Thunderbird to our users without worrying about keeping the lights on, but we are able to fix bugs, build new features and invest in new platforms (Android). It’s important for Thunderbird to exist because it’s not just another app, but one built upon real values.

Our values are:

  • We believe in privacy. We don’t collect your data or spy on you, what you do in Thunderbird is your business, not ours.
  • We believe in digital wellbeing. Thunderbird has no dark patterns, we don’t want you doomscrolling your email. Apps should help, not hurt, you. We want Thunderbird to help you be productive.
  • We believe in open standards. Email works because it is based on open standards. Large providers have undermined these standards to lock users into their platforms. We support and develop the standards to everyone’s benefit.

If you share these values, we ask that you consider supporting Thunderbird. The tech you use doesn’t have to be built upon compromises. Giving to Thunderbird allows us to create good software that is good for you (and the world). Consider giving to support Thunderbird today.

2023 Community Snapshot

As we’ve noted so many times in the previous paragraphs, it’s because of Thunderbird’s open source community that we exist at all. In order to better engage with and acknowledge everyone participating in our projects, this past year we set up a Bitergia instance, which is now public. Bitergia has allowed us to better measure participation in the community and find where we are doing well and improving, and areas where there is room for improvement. We’ve pulled out some interesting metrics below.

For reference, Github and Bugzilla measure developer contributions. TopicBox measures activity across our many mailing lists. Pontoon measures the activity from volunteers who help us translate and localize Thunderbird. SUMO measures the impact of Thunderbird’s support volunteers who engage with our users and respond to their varied support questions.

Contributor & Community Growth

Thank You

In conclusion, we’d simply like to thank this amazing community of Thunderbird supporters who give of their time and resources to create something great. 2023 and 2024 have been years of extraordinary improvement for Thunderbird and the future looks bright. We’re humbled and pleased that so many of you share our values of privacy, digital wellbeing and open standards. We’re committed to continuing to provide Thunderbird for free to everyone, everywhere – thanks to you!

The post State Of The Bird: Thunderbird Annual Report 2023-2024 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

SUMO Blog — Introducing Andrea Murphy

Hi folks,

Super excited to share with you all. Andrea Murphy is joining our team as a Customer Experience Community Program Manager, covering for Konstantina while she’s out on maternity leave. Here’s a short intro from Andrea:

Greetings everyone! I’m thrilled to join the team as Customer Experience Community Program Manager. I work on developing tools, programs and experiences that support, inspire and empower our extraordinary network of volunteers. I’m from Rochester, NY and when I’m not at the office, I’m chasing waterfalls around our beautiful state parks, playing pinball or planning road trips with carefully curated playlists that include fun facts about all of my favorite artists. I’m a pop culture enthusiast, and very good at pub trivia. Add me to your team!

You’ll get a chance to meet Andrea in today’s community call. In the meantime, please join me to welcome Andrea into our community. (: