The Mozilla Blog — Growing Mozilla — and evolving our leadership

Since 2022, Mozilla has been in an active process evolving what we do – and renewing our leadership. Today we announced several updates on the leadership piece of this ongoing work. 

We’ve recognized that Mozilla faces major headwinds in terms of both financial growth and mission impact. While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns that will draw a bigger circle of supporters over the long run. Mozilla’s impact and survival depend on us simultaneously strengthening Firefox AND finding new sources of revenue AND manifesting our mission in fresh ways. That is why we’re working hard on all of these fronts.

We’ve also moved aggressively to attract new leadership and talent to Mozilla. This includes major growth in our Boards, with 40% new Board members since we began our efforts to evolve and grow back in 2022. We’ve also been bringing in new executive talent, including a new MoFo Executive Director and a Managing Partner for Mozilla Ventures. By the end of the year, we hope to have new, permanent CEOs for both MoCo and Mozilla.ai. 

Today we shared two updates as we continue to push forward with this renewal at the leadership level:

1. Mozilla Leadership Council: 

We are creating a Mozilla Leadership Council composed of the top executive from each of Mozilla’s organizations. This includes: Jane Silber (Mozilla.ai), Laura Chambers (Mozilla Corporation), Mohamed Nanabhay (Mozilla Ventures), Nabiha Syed (Mozilla Foundation), Ryan Sipes (MZLA/Thunderbird) and myself. I will act as chair. The purpose of this group is to better coordinate work across our organizations to make sure that Mozilla is more than the sum of its parts. 

2. New Board Chairs: 

Mozilla has built a strong cadre of 16 directors across all of our Boards, bringing an incredible breadth of experience and a commitment to supporting Mozilla in doing the hard and important work ahead. Today we are announcing three new Board chairs: 

  • The new Mozilla Foundation Board Chair is Nicole Wong. Nicole is a respected cross-sector privacy and policy expert and innovator, with leadership roles at Google and Twitter/X, service as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer and positions on multiple corporate and non-profit boards. Nicole has been on Mozilla Foundation’s Board for 8 years. 
  • Kerry Cooper will chair Mozilla Corporation. One of the world’s most respected CMO’s and consumer executives, Kerry has held C-Suite roles at Walmart.com, Rothy’s, Choose Energy and more, and now serves on boards spanning venture, startups and AI innovation. Kerry has been on Mozilla Corporation’s Board for 2 years. 
  • Raffi Krikorian will chair Mozilla.ai. Raffi is a visionary technologist, engineer and leader, who was an early engineering leader at Twitter, headed Uber’s self-driving car lab, and is now CTO at the Emerson Collective where he works at the intersection of emerging technologies and social good. He brings three decades of thoughtful design and implementation within social media and artificial intelligence to Mozilla.

Each of these leaders reflects what I believe will be Mozilla’s ‘secret sauce’ in our next chapter: a mix of experience bridging business, technology and the public interest. Note that these appointments are now reflected on our leadership page. 

With these changes, Mitchell Baker ends her tenure as Chair and a member of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation boards. In co-founding Mozilla, Mitchell built something truly unique and important — a global community and organization that showed how those with vision can shape the world and the future by building technology that puts the needs of humans and humanity first. We are extremely grateful to Mitchell for everything she has done for Mozilla and we are committed to continuing her legacy of fighting for a better future through better technology. I know these feelings are widely shared across Mozilla — we are incredibly appreciative to Mitchell for all that she has done.

As I have said many times over the last few years, Mozilla is entering a new chapter—one where we need to both defend what is good about the web and steer the technology and business models of the AI era in a better direction. I believe that we have the people—indeed, we ARE the people—to do this, and that there are millions around the world ready to help us. I am driven and excited by what lies ahead. 

The post Growing Mozilla — and evolving our leadership appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

The Mozilla Blog — Spring detox with Firefox for iOS

A hand holding a smartphone with a blooming flower growing from the screen, surrounded by sparkles, against an orange gradient background.

A fresh start isn’t just for your home — your iPhone or iPad deserves a privacy detox too. With Firefox for iOS, you can block hidden trackers, stop fingerprinting, and keep your browsing history more private with Enhanced Tracking Protection.

How Firefox for iOS protects you

Websites and advertisers often track your activity using cookies, fingerprinting and redirect trackers. Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection helps detox your browsing experience by blocking these trackers, keeping your personal data safe from prying eyes.

Learn more about how Enhanced Tracking Protection works in this FAQ.

Privacy features built for iOS

✅ Blocks Social Media Trackers – Prevents social media platforms from monitoring your activity across different sites.
✅ Prevents Cross-Site Tracking – Stops advertisers from following your movements from one site to another.
✅ Blocks Cryptominers and Fingerprinters – Protects your device from unauthorized cryptocurrency mining and digital fingerprinting attempts.
✅ Customizable Protection Levels – Choose between Standard and Strict modes to balance protection and site functionality.
✅ Private Browsing Mode – Browse without saving history, cookies, or site data, ensuring your sessions remain confidential.
✅ Sync Across Devices – Use Firefox on your iPhone, iPad, and desktop while keeping your privacy settings intact.

How to check your privacy settings on Firefox for iOS

Make sure you’re getting the best privacy protection by following these steps on your iPhone or iPad:

  1. Open the Firefox app.
  2. Tap the menu (☰) button at the bottom of the screen.
  3. Select Settings, then tap Tracking Protection.
  4. Choose your desired protection level:
    • Standard: Blocks social media trackers, cross-site trackers, cryptominers, and fingerprinters.
    • Strict: Includes all Standard protections and also stops known tracking content, such as videos, ads, and other elements with tracking code. Pages load faster, but this setting may block some website functionality.

A cleaner, safer way to browse on iOS

Spring cleaning isn’t just about organizing your space—it’s about clearing out digital clutter too. With Firefox for iOS, you can enjoy a faster, safer browsing experience while blocking trackers that slow you down.

🌿 Give your privacy a fresh start — join the Spring Detox with Firefox today.

Get Firefox

Get the browser that protects what’s important

The post Spring detox with Firefox for iOS appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

The Mozilla Blog — What is the best hardware concurrency for running inference on CPU?

In the Firefox AI Runtime, we can use multiple threads in the dedicated inference process to speed up execution times CPU. The WASM/JS environment can create a SharedArrayBuffer and run multiple threads against its content and distribute the load on several CPU cores concurrently.

Below is the time taken in seconds on a MacBook M1 Pro, which has 10 physical cores, using our PDF.js image-to-text model to generate an alt text, with different levels of concurrency:

graph showing the inference duration (Y) depending on the number of threads (X). 8 threads is faster with 800ms

So running several threads is a game-changer ! But using more and more threads will start to slow down execution time to a point where it will become slower than not using threads at all. 

So one question we have asked ourselves was: how can we determine the best number of threads ?

Physical vs logical cores

According to our most recent public data report, on desktop, 81% of our users are equipped with an Intel CPU, 14% with AMD and the rest are mostly Apple devices.

All modern CPUs provide more logical cores (also called “threads”) than physical cores. This happens due to technologies like Intel’s Hyper-Threading. Or AMD’s Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT).

For example, the Intel Core i9-10900K chip has 10 physical cores and 20 logical cores.

When you spin up threads equal to the number of logical cores, you might see performance gains, especially when tasks are I/O bound or if the CPU can effectively interleave instructions.

However, for compute-bound tasks (like heavy ML inference), having more threads than physical cores can lead to diminishing returns, or even performance drops, due to factors like thread scheduling overhead and cache contention.

Not all cores are created equal

On Apple Silicon, you don’t just have a quantity of cores; you have different kinds of cores. Some are high-performance cores designed for heavy lifting, while others are efficiency cores that are optimized for lower power consumption.

For instance, Apple M1 Pro chips have a combination of high-performance (8) and efficiency cores (2). The physical cores might total 10, but each performance core is designed for heavy-duty tasks, while efficiency cores typically handle background tasks that are less demanding. 

When your machine is under load with ML tasks, it’s often better to fully utilize the high-performance cores and leave some breathing room for the efficiency cores to handle background or system processes. 

Similarly, Intel’s processors have different cores, most notably starting with their 12th-generation “Alder Lake” architecture. 

These chips feature Performance-cores (P-cores) designed for demanding, single-threaded tasks, and Efficient-cores (E-cores) aimed at background or less intensive workloads. The P-cores can leverage Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology (meaning each P-core can run two logical threads), while E-cores typically run one thread each. This hybrid approach enables the CPU to optimize power usage and performance by scheduling tasks on the cores best suited for them. Like Apple Silicon’s you’d typically want to maximize utilization of the higher-performance P-cores, while leaving some headroom on the E-cores for system processes. 

Android is close to Apple Silicon’s architecture, as most devices are using ARM’s big.LITTLE (or DynamIQ) architecture – with 2 types of cores: “big” and “LITTLE”.

On mobile Qualcomm’s CPU, there can be three types: “Prime”, “Performance” and “Efficiency”. Most recently, some phones like Samsung Galaxy S24 have gained a fourth kind of core (Exynos 2400) allowing even more combinations.

To summarize, all CPU makers have cores dedicated to performance, and cores for efficiency: 

  • Performance: “P-Core”, “big”, “Prime”, “Performance”
  • Efficiency: “E-Core”, “LITTLE”, “Efficiency”

By combining high-efficiency and high-performance cores, Apple Silicon, Androids, and Intel based devices can strike a better balance between power consumption and raw compute power, depending on the demands of the workload.

But if you try to run all cores (performance + efficiency) at maximum capacity, you may see:

  1. Less optimal thread scheduling, because tasks will bounce between slower efficiency cores and faster performance cores.
  2. Contention for shared resources like the memory bus, cache.
  3. And in extreme cases: thermal throttling if the system overheats, and reaches its Thermal Design Point, in which case the clock speed is throttled to cool down the system. 

This is why simply setting the thread count to “all cores, all the time” can be suboptimal for performance.

AMD on the other hand, does not have efficiency cores. Some CPUs like the Ryzen 5 8000 combine two sizes of cores Zen 4 and Zen 4c, but the latter is not an efficiency core and can also be used to run heavy-duty tasks.

navigator.hardwareConcurrency

In a browser, there is a single and simple API you can call: navigator.hardwareConcurrency

This returns the number of logical cores available. Since it’s the only API available on the web, many libraries (including the one we vendor: onnxruntime) default to using navigator.hardwareConcurrency as a baseline for concurrency.

It’s bad practice to use that value directly as it might overcommit threads as we’ve explained in the previous sections. It’s also not aware of the current system’s activity.

For that reason, ONNX formula takes the number of logical cores divided by two and will never set it higher than 4:

Math.min(4, Math.ceil((navigator.hardwareConcurrency || 1) / 2));

That formula works out ok in general, but will not take advantage of all the cores for some devices. For instance, on an Apple M1 Pro, ML tasks could use a concurrency level up to 8 cores instead of 4.

On the other end of the spectrum, a chip like Intel’s i3-1220p that we use in our CI to run tests in Windows 11, which reflects better what our users have – see our hardware section in our Firefox Public Data Report.  

It has 12 logical cores and 10 physical cores that are composed of 8 efficient cores and 2 performance cores. ONNX formula for that chip means we would run with 4 threads, where 2 would be a better value.

navigator.hardwareConcurrency is a good starting point, but it’s just a blunt instrument. It won’t always yield the true “best” concurrency for a given device and a given workload.

MLUtils.getOptimalCPUConcurrency

While it’s impossible to get the best value at any given time without considering the system activity as a whole, looking at the number of physical cores and not using “efficiency” cores, can help to get to a better value.

Llama.cpp for instance is looking at the number of physical cores to decide for concurrency, with a few twists:

  • On any x86_64, it will return the number of performance cores
  • On Android, and any aarch64-based devices like Apple Silicon  it will return the number of performance cores for tri-layered chips.

We’ve implemented something very similar in a C++ API that can be used via XPIDL in our inference engine:

NS_IMETHODIMP MLUtils::GetOptimalCPUConcurrency(uint8_t* _retval) {
  ProcessInfo processInfo = {};
  if (!NS_SUCCEEDED(CollectProcessInfo(processInfo))) {
    return NS_ERROR_FAILURE;  
  }
  #if defined(ANDROID)
    // On android, "big" and "medium" cpus can be used.
    uint8_t cpuCount = processInfo.cpuPCount + processInfo.cpuMCount;
  #else
  # ifdef __aarch64__
    // On aarch64 (like macBooks) we want to avoid efficient cores and stick with "big" cpus.
    uint8_t cpuCount = processInfo.cpuPCount;
  # else
    // on x86_64 we're always using the number of physical cores.
    uint8_t cpuCount = processInfo.cpuCores;
  # endif
  #endif
  *_retval = cpuCount;
  return NS_OK;
}

This function is then straightforward to use from JS shipped within Firefox to configure concurrency when we run inference:

let mlUtils = Cc["@mozilla.org/ml-utils;1"].createInstance(Ci.nsIMLUtils);
const numThreads = mlUtils.getOptimalCPUConcurrency();

We’ve moved away from using navigator.hardwareConcurrency, and we’re now using this new API.

Conclusion

In our quest to find the optimal number of threads, we’re closer to reality now, but there are other factors to consider. The system will use the CPU for other applications so it’s still possible to overload it.

Using more threads is also going to use more memory in our WASM environment, which can become a real issue. Depending on the workload, each additional thread can add up to 100MiB of physical memory usage in our runtime. We’re working on reducing this overhead but on devices that don’t have a lot of memory, limiting concurrency is still our best option.

For our Firefox ML features, we are using a variety of hardware profiles in our performance CI to make sure that we try them on devices that are close to what our users have. The list of devices we have is going to grow in the next few months to make sure we cover the whole spectrum of CPUs. We’ve started collecting and aggregating metrics on a dashboard that helps us understand what can be expected when our users run our inference engine.

The hardware landscape is also evolving a lot. For example, the most recent Apple devices introduced a new instruction set, called AMX, which used to be proprietary, and gave a significant boost compared to Neon. That has now been replaced by an official API called SME. Similarly, some phones are getting more core types, which could impact how we calculate the number of cores to use. Our current algorithm could be changed the day we leverage these new APIs and hardware in our backend.

Another aspect we have not discussed in this post is using GPU or even more specialized units like NPUs, to offload our ML tasks, which will be a post on its own.

The post What is the best hardware concurrency for running inference on CPU? appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

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

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The Mozilla Blog — Bluesky’s Emily Liu on rethinking social media (and why it’s time to chime in)

A smiling woman in a brown jacket stands on a busy city street, overlaid with a blue digital grid background and speech bubble icons.<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Emily Liu is the head of special projects at Bluesky.</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 Emily Liu, head of special projects at Bluesky, as the open-source platform celebrates its first year launching to the public (you can follow Firefox on Bluesky here). She talks about how social media has changed over the last decade, her love for public forums and how her path started with a glitter cursor. 

What is your favorite corner of the internet? 

I’m at the two extremes on the spectrum of private to public content: 

Firstly, I love a good iMessage group text, especially when it’s moving at 100 miles per hour. I strongly believe that everyone needs a good group chat.

At the same time, I love public web forums. This feels like something that’s increasingly rare on the internet as more of us move to private group apps, and I worry that this is equivalent to pulling the ladder up behind us for those who haven’t found those private spaces yet. So I try to do my part by chiming in on public forums when I can offer something useful.

What is the one tab you always regret closing?

I live by Google Calendar and have widgets for it on probably every digital surface — my desktop, my phone lock screen, my laptop side menu, and of course, multiple tabs simultaneously. If something’s not on my calendar, it’s probably not happening.

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

I’m super excited about Bluesky. Obviously I’m unbiased (I work here). We launched the Bluesky app publicly in just February 2024, and under a year later, we crossed 30M people on the network. But the real measure of Bluesky’s growth is that my family has started sending me news articles and asking, “Hey, isn’t this where you work?”

Social networks have become vital public infrastructure, whether it’s to get the latest breaking news, find jobs and opportunities, or stay in touch with our friends and family. Yet over the last decade, closed networks have locked users in, preventing competition and innovation in social media as their services deteriorate. On the other hand, Bluesky is both a social app where your experience online is yours to customize, and an open network that reintroduces competition to social media. This also means that the social network isn’t defined by whoever the CEO is, however capricious they might be.

What was the first online community you engaged with?

In middle school, I ran an anonymous fashion blog on Tumblr. This was before Tumblr had group chats, so internet friends and I co-opted the product by creating a makeshift group DM — a private blog with multiple owners, where every message we sent was really just a post on a private blog. Where there is a will, there is a way, and people are infinitely creative; this is where I learned that the product you design may not be the product that users adopt.

Tumblr was also where I wrote my first lines of code out of desperation for a better blog theme than what the default marketplace provided. Who would’ve thought that adding a visitor counter and a glitter cursor would’ve led me to this point!

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

I feel lucky that in a sense, I am doing this right now through Bluesky. On one hand, there’s the Bluesky app itself. There’s still a bunch of low-hanging fruit to reach feature parity with other social networks, but on top of that, I’m excited about tweaks that might make social media less of a “torment nexus” that other apps haven’t tried yet. Maybe I shouldn’t share them here just yet since I know a certain other company likes to implement Bluesky’s ideas. 😉

And on the other hand, Bluesky is already so customizable that I can configure my experience to be what I want. For example, I’m a big fan of the Quiet Posters custom feed, which shows you posts from people you follow who don’t often post that much, giving you a cozier feel of the network.

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

I have so many open tabs and unread newsletters about China and AI that I need to get to.

What role do you see open web projects like Bluesky playing in shaping the future of the web?

I see Bluesky as just one contributor in the mission of building an open web — we’re not the first project to build an open social network, and we won’t be the last. The collaboration and constructive criticism from other players has been immensely useful. Recently, some independent groups have begun building alternative ATProto infrastructure, which I’m particularly excited about. (ATProto, or the AT Protocol, is the open standard that Bluesky is built upon.) Bluesky’s vision of a decentralized and open social web only comes to fruition when users actually have alternatives to choose from, so I’m rooting for all of these projects too.

Emily Liu is the head of special projects at Bluesky, an open social network that gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience. Previously, Emily built election models and visualizations at The Washington Post, archival tooling at The New York Times, and automated fact-checking at the Duke Reporters’ Lab.

The post Bluesky’s Emily Liu on rethinking social media (and why it’s time to chime in) appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

The Mozilla Blog — Paris AI Action Summit: A milestone for open and Public AI

As we close out the Paris AI Action Summit, one thing is clear: the conversation around open and Public AI is evolving—and gaining real momentum. Just over a year ago at Bletchley Park, open source AI was framed as a risk. In Paris, we saw a major shift. There is now a growing recognition that openness isn’t just compatible with AI safety and advancing public interest AI—it’s essential to it.

We have been vocal supporters of an ecosystem grounded in open competition and trustworthy AI —one where innovation isn’t walled off by dominant players or concentrated in a single geography. Mozilla, therefore, came to this Summit with a clear and urgent message: AI must be open, human-centered, and built for the public good. And across discussions, that message resonated.

Open source AI is entering the conversation in a big way

Two particularly notable moments stood out:

  • European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen spoke about Europe’s “distinctive approach to AI,” emphasizing collaborative, open-source solutions as a path forward.
  • India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi reinforced this vision, calling for open source AI systems to enhance trust and transparency, reduce bias, and democratize technology.

These aren’t just words. The investments and initiatives announced at this Summit mark a real turning point. From the launch of Current AI, an initial $400M public interest AI partnership supporting open source development, to ROOST, a new nonprofit making AI safety tools open and accessible, to the €109 billion investment in AI computing infrastructure announced by President Macron, the momentum is clear. Add to that strong signals from the EU and India, and this Summit stands out as one of the most positive and proactive international gatherings on AI so far.

At the heart of this is Public AI—the idea that we need infrastructure beyond private, purely profit-driven AI. That means building AI that serves society and promotes true innovation even when it doesn’t fit neatly into short-term business incentives. The conversations in Paris show that we’re making progress, but there’s more work to do.

Looking ahead to the next AI summit

Momentum is building, and we must forge onward. The next AI Summit in India will be a critical moment to review the progress on these announcements and ensure organizations like Mozilla—those fighting for open and Public AI infrastructure—have a seat at the table.

Mozilla is committed to turning this vision into reality—no longer a distant, abstract idea, but a movement already in motion.

A huge thanks to the organizers, partners, and global leaders driving this conversation forward. Let’s keep pushing for AI that serves humanity—not the other way around.

––Mitchell Baker
Chairwoman, Mozilla
Paris AI Action Summit Steering Committee Member

The post Paris AI Action Summit: A milestone for open and Public AI appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

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.

The Mozilla Blog — ROOST: Open source AI safety for everyone

Today we want to point to one of the most exciting announcements at the Paris AI summit: the launch of ROOST, a new nonprofit to build AI safety tools for everyone. 

ROOST stands for Robust Open Online Safety Tools, and it’s solving a clear and important problem: many startups, nonprofits, and governments are trying to use AI responsibly every day but they lack access to even the most basic safety tools and resources that are available to large tech companies. This not only puts users at risk but slows down innovation. ROOST has backing from top tech companies and philanthropies alike ensuring that a broad set of stakeholders have a vested stake in its success. This is critical to building accessible, scalable and resilient safety infrastructure all of us need for the AI era. 

What does this mean practically? ROOST is building, open sourcing and maintaining modular building blocks for AI safety, and offering hands-on support by technical experts to enable organizations of all sizes to build and use AI responsibly. With that, organizations can tackle some of the biggest safety challenges such as eliminating child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from AI datasets and models. 

At Mozilla, we’re proud to have helped kickstart this work, providing a small seed grant for the research at Columbia University that eventually turned into ROOST. Why did we invest early? Because we believe the world needs nonprofit public AI organizations that at once complement and serve as a counterpoint to what’s being built inside the big commercial AI labs. ROOST is exactly this kind of organization, with the potential to create the kind of public technology infrastructure the Mozilla, Linux, and Apache foundations developed in the previous era of the internet.

Our support of ROOST is part of a bigger investment in open source AI and safety. 

In October 2023, before the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, Mozilla worked with Professor Camille Francois and Columbia University to publish an open letter that stated  “when it comes to AI Safety and Security, openness is an antidote not a poison.” 

Over 1,800 leading experts and community members signed our letter, which compelled us to start the Columbia Convening series to advance the conversation around AI, openness, and safety. The second Columbia Convening (which was an official event on the road to the French AI Action Summit happening this week), brought together over 45 experts and builders in AI to advance practical approaches to AI safety. This work helped shape some of  the priorities of ROOST and create a community ready to engage with it going forward. We are thrilled to see ROOST emerge from the 100+ leading AI open source organizations we’ve been bringing together the past year. It exemplifies the principles of openness, pluralism, and practicality that unite this growing community. 

Much has changed in the last year. At the Bletchley Park summit, a number of governments and large AI labs had focused the debate on the so-called existential risks of AI — and were proposing limits on open source AI. Just 15 months later, the tide has shifted. With the world gathering at the AI Action Summit in France, countries are embracing openness as a key component of making AI safe in practical development and deployment contexts. This is an important turning point. 

ROOST launches at exactly the right time and in the right place, using this global AI summit to gather a community that will create the practical building blocks we need to enable a safer AI ecosystem. This is the type of work that makes AI safety a field that everyone can shape and improve.

The post ROOST: Open source AI safety for everyone appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

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

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.

The Mozilla Blog — Welcoming Peter Rojas as Mozilla’s SVP of New Products

Headshot of Peter Rojas, Senior Vice President of New Products at Mozilla, wearing a gray sweater and smiling against a white background.

We’re thrilled to share that Peter Rojas has joined Mozilla Corporation as our new Senior Vice President of New Products. In this role, Peter will lead Mozilla’s endeavors to explore, build and scale new products that align with Mozilla’s greater mission and values. He will report to me and join Mozilla’s steering committee. 

At Mozilla, we are continuing to explore and scale new products that diversify revenue, address evolving consumer needs, and positively impact this new era of the internet. Peter brings a deep well of experience at the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship and product innovation –– expertise that will help Mozilla monetize and expand beyond our flagship browser. His leadership will be instrumental in bringing exciting new products to consumers who value privacy, choice and an open web.

Early in Peter’s career, he co-founded several influential startups, including the consumer technology news and review organization Engadget and the blogging network Weblogs Inc. He was also a founding partner at Betaworks Ventures, where he invested in groundbreaking companies like Rec Room, Hugging Face, Facemoji, and 8th Wall, among others. Several of these companies were later acquired by Niantic, Twitter and Google.

Most recently, Peter led incubations and early-stage explorations as head of product for Meta’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) group. He was also a senior product director for Messenger and Instagram Direct, where he helped tackle some of Meta’s biggest product challenges, including the monetization of Messenger. Peter also served as VP of strategy at AOL, overseeing strategy for AOL’s brand group, and was later promoted to co-director of AOL Alpha, the company’s experimental new product group.

In the past few months, Mozilla has brought on some strong, innovative product leadership, welcoming talent such as Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, Firefox SVP, and Ajit Varma, VP of Firefox Product. I look forward to working closely with Peter and our other new product leaders as Mozilla continues to evolve, offering a range of new products and services that advance our mission.

The post Welcoming Peter Rojas as Mozilla’s SVP of New Products appeared first on The Mozilla 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!

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.

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.

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!

The Mozilla Blog — IYKYK: The secret language of memes

A meme-style image featuring a man looking back in surprise while his female companion gestures in disbelief, overlaid with colorful speech bubbles saying "IKR?" and emoji-style icons.
A smiling woman with long dark hair, wearing colorful earrings and a navy blue polka dot top, in front of a turquoise background.
Dr. Erica Brozovsky is a sociolinguist, a public scholar and a lover of words. She is the host of Otherwords, a PBS series on language and linguistics, and a professor of writing and rhetoric at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. You can find her at @ericabrozovsky on most platforms. Photo: Kelly Zhu

If you’ve been on the internet anytime in the past 25 years, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a meme, shared a meme, or perhaps even created a meme. From the LOLcats and Advice Animals of the mid 2000s to the many emotions of Moo Deng, the world’s favorite pygmy hippopotamus, internet memes allow us to share pieces of media that we find funny, ironic or relatable.

Author Mike Godwin coined the term “internet meme” in the June 1993 edition of Wired magazine. However, that wasn’t the advent of the word meme. In his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene,” evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins conceived the term to represent “ideas, behaviors, or styles that spread from person to person.” If you think that sounds a bit contagious, you’re absolutely correct. Much as contagion spreads, so does the imitation of ideas in the form of memes, circulating humor across society.

But who claims the crown of first ever internet meme? Is it the 1998 Hamster Dance gif created by ​​Deidre LaCarte as a GeoCities page?

Or is it the 1996 Autodesk Dancing Baby that has now become an NFT? (Creator Michael Girard claims so.)

Those definitely went viral, but are they memes? Perhaps not. A funny image (or gif or video) is just a funny image… or gif, or video… unless it achieves the two keys to memehood: inspiring creative variations (that are then copied and spread) and being imbued with cultural context, like that Pepperidge Farm meme (iykyk).

from Imgflip Meme Generator

The Cow Guide, for example, might be considered a precursor to the internet meme.

Full of ASCII character drawings of variations on cows, The Cow Guide spread on Usenet in the ‘80s and ‘90s (pre-World Wide Web), with people adding new cows with every repost. While memes do exist offline, internet memes really took off in the 2000s within anonymous web communities like 4chan — which required images with each post — and Reddit and Tumblr, which debuted in 2003, 2005, and 2007, respectively. In the late aughts, internet curators like BuzzFeed and social media sites made memes more mainstream. And now they’re everywhere.

Meme culture is so quick, with turnaround and multiple iterations within minutes of an event happening. Even if the source material is a real and consequential topic, a funny meme brings attention, as humor and levity travels further and faster than seriousness and sincerity. 

Global and national events (like the Olympics and the U.S. presidential election) are goldmines for meme-able opportunities that allow information to spread faster than the traditional news cycle. Take, for instance, Stephen Nedoroscik, Team USA’s horse powerhouse, who became the subject of countless memes for his incredible performance and comparisons to Clark Kent.

But how is it that memes are significant enough to have given rise to an entire academic field — memetics — and a category in the Library of Congress? The U.K.’s National Science and Media Museum is even putting this absolute unit on display as their first “digitally-born object.”

Are memes useful for more than just laughs or, more realistically, those small exhales through the nose of mild amusement?

Definitively, yes. Here’s a comparison: A minute is a unit of time, a meter is a unit of measure, and a meme is a unit of culture. Today internet memes (which we’ll just call memes) can be described as “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by internet users, creating a shared cultural experience.” The key part of that definition is the creation of a shared cultural experience. That seems pretty deep for something so trivial as a reaction GIF or silly picture with text slapped on it, but it’s true. 

Think of it this way: Have you ever made a reference, maybe to a movie, a song lyric, a book or a funny TikTok you saw, only to be met with silence or questioning looks from the group you’re talking to? When even just one other person gets the reference, you feel a sense of kinship; you know the two of you have something in common. This is what happens with memes. The internet is so vast now that we’re not all part of the same communities online, so when you “get” a meme, there’s a shared sense of humor and a feeling of belonging. And laughing together strengthens relationships and fosters community, making you feel close

Nowadays, memes have grown into the mainstream, many making it outside of their original subculture to become widely culturally relevant. And the faces behind some popular memes have gained celebrity status even offline. Case in point: In early November 2024, the people beyond three iconic memes of the 2010s met up, causing an internet uproar. 

There’s a meme out there for every facet of your identity and every interest you hold, from a corporate job to a keen interest in birdwatching to crossovers between Pokémon and Thomas the Tank Engine. When multiple specific interests collide in a meme… well there’s a reason the phrase “I’ve never had an original thought or experience” became so popular online.

That’s not even touching the surface of the weird, wild and wonderful world of niche memes. And that is exactly where the hyper-specific meme shines in its ability to broker connections. If you can parse through the layers of meaning and referential humor, then you’re part of the exclusive club of people in the know. 

@mduffy_

the way 2013 shaped my brain #vine #tumblr #internet #lore

♬ original sound – miss ayané ᥫ᭡.

Today, we can be defined by the media we consume, so understanding a meme, especially if it’s highly intertextual and referential, gives insight into who a person is and what corners of the internet they inhabit. Memes serve as inside jokes for subcommunities online, and the more iterations and riffs on the joke, the higher barrier to entry for outsiders, further cementing the group’s identity. If you understand a niche meme, you come to realize you’re part of a very specific collective of internet users, for better or for worse.

A meme is a digital manifestation of a shared online experience and interaction. They have set structures and social dynamics, and by intertextually referencing various pop culture tokens, they show affiliation and affinity to specific internet subgroups. They subtly ask if you understand, and if you do (and iykyk), you’re initiated into the club as “one of us, one of us!” Memes are not random. They’re created to appeal to a specific chosen audience who will then hopefully pass on the meme like a contagion of amusement because they identify with it. 

We share memes because we assume our audience, upon wading through the subtext, will find them worthwhile, whether because of humor or in-group membership. Whether posting into the void that is Tumblr or 4chan or Reddit, or sending memes directly to your friends or family in a form of digital pebbling — like penguins presenting smooth stones to their prospective mates in courtship rituals — spreading these internet cultural tokens is a bid for social connection. And through that connection, we show affiliation with others who understand the digital inside joke that is a shared piece of popular culture. Memes are cultural artifacts and efficient forms of communication to those who understand the context. And oftentimes they’re funny, which is just an added bonus. Put simply, humans crave connection, and memes just do it for us. 

Get Firefox

Get the browser that protects what’s important

The post IYKYK: The secret language of memes appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

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.

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.

The Mozilla Blog — Running inference in web extensions

Image generated by DALL*E using the following prompt: A person standing on a platform in the ocean, surrounded by big waves. They are holding a sail with a big Firefox logo on it. Make it like Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa print and make sure the boat looks like it can actually stay afloat

Image generated by DALL*E

We’re shipping a new API in Firefox Nightly that will let you use our Firefox AI runtime to run offline machine learning tasks in your web extension.

Firefox AI Runtime

We’ve recently shipped a new component inside of Firefox that leverages Transformers.js (a JavaScript equivalent of Hugging Face’s Transformers Python library) and the underlying ONNX runtime engine. This component lets you run any machine learning model that is compatible with Transformers.js in the browser, with no server-side calls beyond the initial download of the models. This means Firefox can run everything on your device and avoid sending your data to third parties.

Web applications can already use Transformers.js in vanilla JavaScript, but running through our platform offers some key benefits:

  • The inference runtime is executed in a dedicated, isolated process, for safety and robustness
  • Model files are stored using IndexedDB and shared across origins
  • Firefox-specific performance improvements are done to accelerate the runtime

This platform shipped in Firefox 133 to provide alt text for images in PDF.js, and will be used in several other places in Firefox 134 and beyond to improve the user experience.

We also want to unblock the community’s ability to experiment with these capabilities. Starting later today, developers will be able to access a new trial “ml” API in Firefox Nightly. This API is basically a thin wrapper around Firefox’s internal API, but with a few additional restrictions for user privacy and security.

There are two major differences between this API and most other WebExtensions APIs: the API is highly experimental and permission to use it must be requested after installation.

This new API is virtually guaranteed to change in the future. To help set developer expectations, the “ml” API is exposed under the “browser.trial” namespace rather than directly on the “browser” global object. Any API exposed on “browser.trial” may not be compatible across major versions of Firefox. Developers should guard against breaking changes using a combination of feature detection and strict_min_version declarations. You can see a more detailed description of how to write extensions with it in our documentation.

Running an inference task

Performing inference directly in the browser is quite exciting. We expect people will be able to build compelling features using the browser’s data locally.

Like the original Transformers that inspired it, Transformers.js uses “tasks” to abstract away implementation details for performing specific kinds of ML workloads. You can find a description of all tasks that Transformers.js supports in the project’s official documentation.

For our first iteration, Firefox exposes  the following tasks:

  • text-classification – Assigning a label or class to a given text
  • token-classification – Assigning a label to each token in a text
  • question-answering – Retrieve the answer to a question from a given text
  • fill-mask –  Masking some of the words in a sentence and predicting which words should replace those masks
  • summarization – Producing a shorter version of a document while preserving its important information.
  • translation – Converting text from one language to another
  • text2text-generation – converting one text sequence into another text sequence
  • text-generation – Producing new text by predicting the next word in a sequence
  • zero-shot-classification – Classifying text into classes that are unseen during training
  • image-to-text – Output text from a given image
  • image-classification – Assigning a label or class to an entire image
  • image-segmentation – Divides an image into segments where each pixel is mapped to an object 
  • zero-shot-image-classification – Classifying images into classes that are unseen during training
  • object-detection – Identify objects of certain defined classes within an image
  • zero-shot-object-detection – Identify objects of classes that are unseen during training
  • document-question-answering – Answering questions on document image
  • image-to-image – Transforming a source image to match the characteristics of a target image or a target image domain
  • depth-estimation – Predicting the depth of objects present in an image
  • feature-extraction – Transforming raw data into numerical features that can be processed while preserving the information in the original dataset
  • image-feature-extraction – Transforming raw data into numerical features that can be processed while preserving the information in the original image

For each task, we’ve selected a default model. See the list here EngineProcess.sys.mjs – mozsearch. These curated models are all stored in our Model Hub at https://model-hub.mozilla.org/. A Model Hub is how Hugging Face defines an online storage of models, see The Model Hub. Whether used by Firefox itself or an extension, models are automatically downloaded on the first use and cached.

Below is example below showing how to run a summarizer in your extension with the default model:

async function summarize(text) {
  await browser.trial.ml.createEngine({taskName: "summarization"});
  const result = await browser.trial.ml.runEngine({args: [text]});
  return result[0]["summary_text"];
}

If you want to use another model, you can use any model published on Hugging Face by Xenova or the Mozilla organization. For now, we’ve restricted downloading models from those two organizations, but we might relax this limitation in the future.

To use an allow-listed model from Hugging Face, you can use an options object to set the “modelHub” option to “huggingface”  and the “taskName” option to the appropriate task when creating an engine.

Let’s modify the previous example to use a model that can summarize larger texts:

async function summarize(text) {
  await browser.trial.ml.createEngine({
    taskName: "summarization", 
    modelHub: "huggingface", 
    modelId: "Xenova/long-t5-tglobal-base-16384-book-summary"
   });
  const result = await browser.trial.ml.runEngine({args: [text]});
  return result[0]["summary_text"];
}

Our PDF.js alt text feature follows the same pattern:

  • Gets the image to describe
  • Use the “image-to-text” task with the “mozilla/distilvit” model
  • Run the inference and return the generated text

This feature is built directly into Firefox, but we’ve also made a web extension example out of it, that you can find in our source code and use as a basis to build your own. See https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/components/ml/docs/extensions-api-example. For instance, it includes some code to request the relevant permission, and a model download progress bar.

We’d love to hear from you

This API is our first attempt to enable the community to build on the top of our Firefox AI Runtime. We want to make this API as simple and powerful as possible.

We believe that offering this feature to web extensions developers will help us learn and understand if and how such an API could be developed as a web standard in the future.

We’d love to hear from you and see what you are building with this.

Come and say hi in our dedicated Mozilla AI discord #firefox-ai. Discord invitation: https://discord.gg/Jmmq9mGwy7

Last but not least, we’re doing a deep dive talk at the FOSDEM in the Mozilla room Sunday February 2nd in Brussels. There will be many interesting talks in that room, see: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/mozilla/

The post Running inference in web extensions appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

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

 

The Mozilla Blog — Supercharge your day: Firefox features for peak productivity

Illustration of a browser interface with five large icons: a pin, magnifying glass, sparkles, an "X," and a menu, set against a gradient orange and yellow background with playful shapes like lightning bolts and stars.

Hi, I’m Tapan. As the leader of Firefox’s Search and AI efforts, my mission is to help users find what they are looking for on the web and stay focused on what truly matters. Outside of work, I indulge my geek side by building giant Star Wars Lego sets and sharing weekly leadership insights through my blog, Building Blocks. These hobbies keep me grounded and inspired as I tackle the ever-evolving challenges of the digital world.

I’ve always been fascinated by the internet — its infinite possibilities, endless rabbit holes and the wealth of knowledge just a click away. But staying focused online can feel impossible. I spend my days solving user problems, crafting strategies, and building products that empower people to navigate the web more effectively. Yet, even I am not immune to the pull of distraction. Let me paint you a picture of my daily online life. It’s a scene many of you might recognize: dozens of tabs open, notifications popping up from every corner, and a long to-do list staring at me. In this chaos, I’ve learned that staying focused requires intention and the right tools.

Over the years, I have discovered several Firefox features that are absolute game-changers for staying productive online:

1. Pinned Tabs: Anchor your essentials

Pinned Tabs get me to my most essential tabs in one click. I have a few persistent pinned tabs — my email, calendar, and files — and a few “daily” pinned tabs — my “must-dos” of the day tabs. This is my secret weapon for keeping my workspace organized. Pinned Tabs stay put and don’t clutter my tab bar, making it easy to switch between key resources without hunting my tab list.

To pin a tab, right-click it and select “Pin Tab.” Now, your essential tabs will always be at your fingertips.

2. Search: Use the fast lane

The “@” shortcut is my productivity superpower, taking me to search results in a flash. By typing “@amazon,” “@bing,” or “@history” followed by your search terms, you can instantly search those platforms or your browsing history without leaving your current page. This saves me time by letting me jump right to search results.

In the next Firefox update, we are making the search term persistent in the address bar so that you can use the address bar to refine your searches for supported sites.

To search supported sites, type “@” in the address bar and pick any engine from the supported list.

3. AI-powered summarization: Cut to the chase

This is one of my favorite recent additions to Firefox. Our AI summarization feature can distill long articles or documents into concise summaries, helping you grasp the key points without wading through endless text. Recently, I used Firefox’s AI summarization to condense sections of research papers on AI. This helped me quickly grasp the key findings and apply them to our strategy discussions for enhancing Firefox’s AI features. Using AI to help build AI!

To use AI-powered summarization, type “about:preferences#experimental” in the address bar and enable “AI chatbot.” Pick your favorite chatbot and sign in. Select any text on a page you wish to summarize and right-click to pick “Ask <your chatbot>.” We are adding new capabilities to this list with every release.

4. Close Duplicate Tabs: Declutter your workspace

If you are like me, you’ve probably opened the same webpage multiple times without realizing it. Firefox’s “Close Duplicate Tabs” feature eliminates this problem.

By clicking the tab list icon  at the top-right corner of the Firefox window, you can detect and close duplicate tabs, keeping your workspace clean and reducing mental load. This small but mighty tool is for anyone prone to tab overload.

5. Reader View: Eliminate distractions

Reader View transforms cluttered web pages into clean, distraction-free layouts. You can focus entirely on the content by stripping away ads, pop-ups, and other distractions. Whether reading an article or researching, this feature keeps your mind on the task.

To enable it, click the Reader View icon in the address bar when viewing a page.

These Firefox features have transformed how I navigate the web, helping me stay focused, productive, and in control of my time online. Whether managing a complex task, diving into research, or just trying to stay on top of your daily tasks, these tools can help you take charge of your browsing experience.

What are your favorite Firefox productivity tips? I would love to hear how you customize Firefox to fit your life.

Let’s make the web work for us!

Get Firefox

Get the browser that protects what’s important

The post Supercharge your day: Firefox features for peak productivity appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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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.

Open Policy & Advocacy — Behind the Scenes of eIDAS: A Look at Article 45 and Its Implications

On October 21, 2024, Mozilla hosted a panel discussion during the Global Encryption Summit to explore the ongoing debate around Article 45 of the eIDAS regulation. Moderated by Robin Wilton from the Internet Society, the panel featured experts Dennis Jackson from Mozilla, Alexis Hancock from Certbot at EFF, and Thomas Lohninger from epicenter.works. Our panelists provided their insights on the technical, legal, and privacy concerns surrounding Article 45 and the potential impact on internet security and privacy. The panel, facilitated by Mozilla in connection with its membership on the Global Encryption Coalition Steering Committee, was part of the annual celebration of Global Encryption Day on October 21.

What is eIDAS and Why is Article 45 Important?

The original eIDAS regulation, introduced in 2014, aimed to create a unified framework for secure electronic identification (eID) and trust services across the European Union. Such trust services, provided by designated Trust Service Providers (TSPs), included electronic signatures, timestamps, and website authentication certificates. Subsequently, Qualified Web Authentication Certificates (QWACs) were also recognized as a method to verify that the entity behind a website also controls the domain in an effort to increase trust amongst users that they are accessing a legitimate website.

Over the years, the cybersecurity community has expressed its concerns for users’ privacy and security regarding the use of QWACs, as they can lead to a false sense of security. Despite this criticism, in 2021, an updated EU proposal to the original law, in essence, aimed to mandate the recognition of QWACs as long as they were issued by qualified TSPs. This, in practice, would undermine decades of web security measures and put users’ privacy and security at stake.

The Security Risk Ahead campaign raised awareness and addressed these issues by engaging widely with policymakers and including through a public letter signed by more than 500 experts that was also endorsed by organizations including Internet Society, European Digital Rights (EDRi), EFF, and Epicenter.works among others.

The European Parliament introduced last-minute changes to mitigate risks of surveillance and fraud, but these safeguards now need to be technically implemented to protect EU citizens from potential exposure.

Technical Concerns and Security Risks

Thomas Lohninger provided context on how Article 45 fits into the larger eIDAS framework. He explained that while eIDAS aims to secure the wider digital ecosystem, QWACs under Article 45 could erode trust in website security, affecting both European and global users.

Dennis Jackson, a member of Mozilla’s cryptography team, cautioned that without robust safeguards, Qualified Website Authentication Certificates (QWACs) could be misused, leading to increased risk of fraud. He noted limited involvement of technical experts in drafting Article 45 resulted in significant gaps within the law. The version of Article 45, as originally proposed in 2021, radically expanded the capabilities of EU governments to surveil their citizens by ensuring that cryptographic keys under government control can be used to intercept encrypted web traffic across the EU.

Why Extended Validation Certificates (EVs) Didn’t Work—and Why Article 45 Might Not Either

Alexis Hancock compared Article 45 to extended validation (EV) certificates, which were introduced years ago with similar intentions but ultimately failed to achieve their goals. EV certificates were designed to offer more information about the identity of websites but ended up being expensive and ineffective as most users didn’t even notice them.

Hancock cautioned that QWACs could suffer from the same problems. Instead of focusing on complex authentication mechanisms, she argued, the priority should be on improving encryption and keeping the internet secure for everyone, regardless of whether a website has paid for a specific type of certificate.

Balancing Security and Privacy: A Tough Trade-Off

A key theme was balancing online transparency and protecting user privacy. All the panelists agreed that while identifying websites more clearly may have its advantages, it should not come at the expense of privacy and security. The risk is that requiring more authentication online could lead to reduced anonymity and greater potential for surveillance, undermining the principles of free expression and privacy on the internet.

The panelists also pointed out that Article 45 could lead to a fragmented internet, with different regions adopting conflicting rules for registering and asserting ownership of a website. This fragmentation would make it harder to maintain a secure and unified web, complicating global web security.

The Role of Web Browsers in Protecting Users

Web browsers, like Firefox, play a crucial role in protecting users. The panelists stressed that browsers have a responsibility to push back against policies that could compromise user privacy or weaken internet security.

Looking Ahead: What’s Next for eIDAS and Web Security?

Thomas Lohninger raised the possibility of legal challenges to Article 45. If the regulation is implemented in a way that violates privacy rights or data protection laws, it could be contested under the EU’s legal frameworks, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive. Such battles could be lengthy and complex however, underscoring the need for continued advocacy.

As the panel drew to a close, the speakers emphasized that while the recent changes to Article 45 represent progress, the fight is far from over. The implementation of eIDAS continues to evolve, and it’s crucial that stakeholders, including browsers, cybersecurity experts, and civil society groups, remain vigilant in advocating for a secure and open internet.

The consensus from the panel was clear: as long as threats to encryption and web security exist, the community must stay engaged in these debates. Scrutinizing policies like eIDAS  is essential to ensure they truly serve the interests of internet users, not just large institutions or governments.

The panelists concluded by calling for ongoing collaboration between policymakers, technical experts, and the public to protect the open web and ensure that any changes to digital identity laws enhance, rather than undermine, security and privacy for all.

—
You can watch the panel discussion here.

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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.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

Open Policy & Advocacy — Mozilla Participates to Ofcom’s Draft Transparency Reporting Guidance

On 4th October 2024, Mozilla provided our input to Ofcom’s consultation on its draft transparency reporting guidance. Transparency plays a crucial role in promoting accountability and public trust, particularly when it comes to how tech platforms handle harmful or illegal content online and we were pleased to share our research, insight, and input with Ofcom.

Scope of the Consultation

Ofcom’s proposed guidance aims to improve transparency reporting, allowing the public, researchers, and regulators to better understand how categorized services operate and whether they are doing enough to respect users’ rights and protect users from harm.

We support this effort and believe additional clarifications are needed to ensure that Ofcom’s transparency process fully meets its objectives. The following clarifications will ensure that the transparency reporting process effectively holds tech companies accountable, safeguards users, fosters public trust, and allows for effective use of transparency reporting by different stakeholders.

The Importance of Standardization

One of our key recommendations is the need for greater standardization in transparency elements. Mozilla’s research on public ad repositories developed by many of the largest online platforms finds that there are large discrepancies across these transparency tools, making it difficult for researchers and regulators to compare information across platforms.

Ofcom’s guidance must ensure that transparency reports are clear, systematic, and easy to compare year-to-year. We recommend that Ofcom provide explicit guidelines on the specific data platforms must provide in their transparency reports and the formats in which they should be reported. This will enable platforms to comply uniformly and make it easier for regulators and researchers to monitor patterns over time.

In particular, we encourage Ofcom to distinguish between ‘core’ and ‘thematic’ information in transparency reports. We understand that core information will be required consistently every year, while thematic data will focus on specific regulatory priorities, such as emerging areas of concern. However, it is important that platforms are given enough advance notice to prepare their systems for thematic information to avoid any disproportionate compliance burden. This is particularly important for smaller businesses who have limited resources and may find it challenging to comply with new reporting criteria, compared to big tech companies.

We also recommend that data about content engagement and account growth should be considered ‘core’ information that needs to be collected and reported on a regular basis. This data is essential for monitoring civic discourse and election integrity.

Engaging a Broader Range of Stakeholders

Mozilla also believes that a broad range of stakeholders should be involved in shaping and reviewing transparency reporting. Ofcom’s consultative approach with service providers is commendable.  We encourage further expansion of this engagement to include stakeholders such as researchers, civil society organizations, and end-users.

Based on our extensive research, we recommend “transparency delegates.” Transparency delegates are experts who can act as intermediaries between platforms and the public, by using their expertise to evaluate platforms’ transparency in a particular area (for example, AI) and to convey relevant information to a wider audience. This could help ensure that transparency reports are accessible and useful to a range of audiences, from policymakers to everyday users who may not have the technical expertise to interpret complex data.

Enhancing Data Access for Researchers

Transparency reports alone are not enough to ensure accountability. Mozilla emphasizes the importance of giving independent researchers access to platform data. In our view, data access is not just a tool for academic inquiry but a key component of public accountability. Ofcom should explore mechanisms for providing researchers with access to data in a way that protects user privacy while allowing for independent scrutiny of platform practices.

This access is crucial for understanding how content moderation practices affect civic discourse, public safety, and individual rights online. Without it, we risk relying too heavily on self-reported data, which can be inconsistent or incomplete.  Multiple layers of transparency are needed, in order to build trust in the quality of platform transparency disclosures.

Aligning with Other Regulatory Frameworks

Finally, we encourage Ofcom to align its transparency requirements with those set out in other major regulatory frameworks, particularly the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Harmonization will help reduce the compliance burden on platforms and allow users and researchers to compare transparency reports more easily across jurisdictions.

Mozilla looks forward to continuing our work with Ofcom and other stakeholders to create a more transparent and accountable online ecosystem.

 

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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.

Open Policy & Advocacy — Mozilla Responds to BIS’ Proposed Rule on Reporting Requirements for the Development of Advanced AI Models and Computing Clusters

Lately, we’ve talked a lot about the importance of ensuring that governments take into account open source, especially when it comes to AI. We submitted comments to NIST on Dual-Use Foundation Models and NTIA on the benefits of openness, and advocated in Congress. As frontier models and big tech continue to dominate the policy discussion, we need to ensure that open source remains top of mind for policymakers and regulators. At Mozilla, we know that open source is a fundamental driver of software that benefits people instead of a few big tech corporations, and it helps enable breakthroughs in medicine, science, and allows smaller companies to compete with tech giants. That’s why we’ll continue to raise the voice of the open source community in regulatory circles whenever we can – and most recently, at the Department of Commerce.

Last month, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) released a proposed rule about reporting requirements for developing advanced AI models and computing clusters. This rule stems from the White House’s 2023 Executive Order on AI, which focuses on the safe and trustworthy development of AI. BIS asked for feedback from industry and stakeholders on topics such as the notification schedule for entities covered by the rule, how information is collected and stored, and what thresholds would trigger reporting requirements for these AI models and clusters.

While BIS’ proposed rule seeks to balance national security with economic concerns, it doesn’t adequately take into account the needs of the open source community or provide clarity as to how the proposed rule may affect them. This is critical given some of the most capable and widely used AI models are open source or partially open source. Open source software is a key driver of technological progress in AI and creates tremendous economic and security benefits for the United States. In our full comments, we set out how BIS can further engage with the open-source community and we emphasize the value that open-source offers for both the economy and national security. Below are some key points from our feedback to BIS:

1. BIS should clarify how the proposed rules would apply to open-source projects, especially since many don’t have a specific owner, are distributed globally, and are freely available. Ideally BIS could work with organizations like the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to come up with a framework.

2. As BIS updates the technical conditions for collection thresholds in response to technological advancements, we suggest setting a minimum update cycle of six months. This is crucial given the rapid pace of change in the AI landscape. It’s also necessary to maintain BIS’ core focus on the regulation of frontier models and to not unnecessarily stymie innovation across the broader AI ecosystem.

3. BIS should provide additional clarity about what ‘planned applicable activities’ and when a project is considered ‘planned.’

Mozilla appreciates BIS’s efforts to try and balance the benefits and risks of AI when it comes to national and economic security. We hope that BIS further considers the potential impact of the proposed rule and future regulatory actions on the open source community and appropriately weighs the myriad benefits which open source AI and open source software more broadly produce for America’s national and economic interests. We look forward to providing views as the US Government continues work on these important issues.

The post Mozilla Responds to BIS’ Proposed Rule on Reporting Requirements for the Development of Advanced AI Models and Computing Clusters appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

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.

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.

Open Policy & Advocacy — How Lawmakers Can Help People Take Control of Their Privacy

At Mozilla, we’ve long advocated for universal opt-out mechanisms that empower people to easily assert their privacy rights. A prime example of this is Global Privacy Control (GPC), a feature built into Firefox. When enabled, GPC sends a clear signal to websites that the user does not wish to be tracked or have their personal data sold.

California’s landmark privacy law, the CCPA, mandates that tools like GPC must be respected, giving consumers greater control over their data. Encouragingly, similar provisions are emerging in other state laws. Yet, despite this progress, many browsers and operating systems – including the largest ones – still do not offer native support for these mechanisms.

That’s why we were encouraged by the advancement of California AB 3048, a bill that would require browsers and mobile operating systems to include an opt-out setting, allowing consumers to easily communicate their privacy preferences.

Mozilla was disappointed that AB 3048 was not signed into law. The bill was a much-needed step in the right direction.

As policymakers advance similar legislation in the future, there are small changes to the AB 3048 text that we’d propose, to ensure that the bill doesn’t create potential loopholes that undermine its core purpose and weaken existing standards like Global Privacy Control by leaving too much room for interpretation. It’s essential that rules prioritize consumer privacy and meet the expectations that consumers rightly have about treatment of their sensitive personal information.

Mozilla remains committed to working alongside California as the legislature considers its agenda for 2025, as well as other states and ultimately the U.S. Congress, to advance meaningful privacy protections for all people online. We hope to see legislation bolstering this key privacy tool reemerge in California, and advance throughout the US.

The post How Lawmakers Can Help People Take Control of Their Privacy appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

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.

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.

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. (:

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Help Us Test the Thunderbird for Android Beta!

The Thunderbird for Android beta is out and we’re asking our community to help us test it. Beta testing helps us find critical bugs and rough edges that we can polish in the next few weeks. The more people who test the beta and ensure everything in the testing checklist works correctly, the better!

Author’s Note (January 27, 2025): Even though it’s been a few months since we launched the stable version of Thunderbird for Android, we still need beta testers! As we launch new features and make needed improvements, beta testers help us know what’s working and what isn’t. With major beta releases, staff provides testing guidance similar to this blog post. To join us, download the beta from the links below, and follow the advice in ‘Where to Give Feedback.’

Help Us Test!

Anyone can be a beta tester! Whether you’re an experienced beta tester or you’ve never tested a beta image before, we want to make it easy for you. We are grateful for your time and energy, so we aim to make testing quick, efficient, and hopefully fun!!

The release plan is as follows, and we hope to stick to this timeline unless we encounter any major hurdles:

  • September 30 – First beta for Thunderbird for Android
  • Third week of October – first release candidate
  • Fourth week of October – Thunderbird for Android release

Download the Beta Image

Below are the options for where you can download with Beta and get started:

We are still working on preparing F-Droid builds. In the meanwhile, please make use of the other two download mechanisms.

Use the Testing Checklist

Once you’ve downloaded the Thunderbird for Android beta, we’d like you to check that you can do the following:

  • Automatic Setup (user only provides email address and maybe password)
  • Manual Setup (user provides server settings)
  • Read Messages
  • Fetch Messages
  • Switch accounts
  • Move email to folder
  • Notify for new message
  • Edit drafts
  • Write message
  • Send message
  • Email actions: reply, forward
  • Delete email
  • NOT experience data loss

Test the K-9 Mail to Thunderbird for Android Transfer

If you’re already using K-9 Mail, you can help test an important feature: transferring your data from K-9 Mail to Thunderbird for Android. To do this, you’ll need to make sure you’ve upgraded to the latest beta version of K-9 Mail.

This transfer process is a key step in making it easier for K-9 Mail users to move over to Thunderbird. Testing this will help ensure a smooth and reliable experience for future users making the switch.

Later builds will additionally include a way to transfer your information from Thunderbird Desktop to Thunderbird for Android.

What we’re not testing

We know it’s tempting to comment about everything you notice in the beta. For the purpose of this short initial beta, we won’t be focusing on addressing longstanding issues. Instead, we ask you to be laser focused on critical bugs, the checklist above, and issues could prevent users from effectively interacting with the app, to help us deliver a great initial release.

Where to Give Feedback

Share your feedback on the Thunderbird for Android beta mailing list and see the feedback of other users. It’s easy to sign up and let us know what worked and more importantly, what didn’t work from the tasks above. For bug reports, please provide as much detail as possible including steps to reproduce the issue, your device model and OS version, and any relevant screenshots or error messages.

Want to chat with other community members, including other testers and contributors working on Thunderbird for Android? Join us on Matrix!

Do you have ideas you would like to see in future versions of Thunderbird for Android? Let us know on Mozilla Connect, our official site to submit and upvote ideas.

The post Help Us Test the Thunderbird for Android Beta! appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Contribute to Thunderbird for Android

The wait is almost over! Thunderbird for Android will be here soon. As an open-source project, we could not succeed without the incredible volunteer contributors who help us along the way. Whether you’re a fan of problem-solving, localization, testing, development, or even just spreading the word, there’s a role for you in our community. Contributing doesn’t just benefit us – it’s a great way to grow your own skills and make a real difference in the lives of thousands of Thunderbird users worldwide. However you choose to contribute to Thunderbird for Android, we’re always happy to welcome new friends to the project!

Support

If you’re a natural at getting to the root of problems, consider becoming a support contributor!

When you answer a support question, you’re not only helping the person who asked the question, you’re helping the hundreds if not thousands of people who read it. Or if you like writing and editing, you can help with our knowledge base (KB) articles!

Support for Thunderbird on Android will live on Mozilla Support, aka SUMO, just like support for the Desktop application, but under its own product tile. We’ve put together a guide to get you started on SUMO, from setting up an account and finding questions to best practices, whether you to decide to help in the question forums or in the KB articles. Want to talk to other support volunteers? Join us on our Support Crew Matrix channel.

Localization

Thunderbird’s users are all over the world, and our localization contributors put the app and support articles in their language. Thunderbird for Android’s localization lives on Weblate, copyleft libre continuous localization that powers many other open source projects. If you haven’t used Weblate before, they have a useful guide for getting started.

Testing

If you want to try the newest features and help us polish and perfect them before they make it to a general release, join us as a tester. Testers are comfortable using daily and beta releases and providing meaningful feedback to developers.

When they’re available, you can download the Thunderbird for Android Beta releases from the Google Play Store or from GitHub under the ‘Pre-Release’. F-Droid users will need to manually select beta versions. To get update notification for non-suggested versions you need to check ‘Settings > Expert mode > Unstable updates’ in the F-Droid app.

Just like Thunderbird for desktop, we have a mailing list where you can give feedback and talk to developers and fellow beta testers.

Development

Interested at helping at the code level? All our development happens on our GitHub page, where you can read our code contributor section in our CONTRIBUTING.md page.

Look for issues that are tagged ‘good first issue,’ even if you’re an experienced developer but are new to Thunderbird for Android. Use the android-planning mailing list to talk to and get feedback from other developers.

Promote Thunderbird for Android

Spreading the word about Thunderbird for Android is an essential way to contribute, and there are many ways to do this. You can leave us a positive review on the Google Play Store (if you had a positive experience, of course) and encourage others to download and try Thunderbird for Android. This could be friends or family, a local computer club, or any other group you could think of! We’d love to hear your ideas and find a way to support you on the android-planning mailing list.

Financial Support

Financial support is a fantastic way to ensure the project continues to thrive. Your gift goes toward improving features, fixing bugs, and expanding the app’s functionality for all of its users.

By supporting Thunderbird financially, you’re investing in open-source software that respects your privacy and gives you control over your data. Every contribution, no matter how small, helps us maintain our independence and stay true to our mission.

The post Contribute to Thunderbird for Android appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

SUMO Blog — Contributor spotlight – Noah Y

Hey everybody,

In today’s edition of our Contributor Spotlight, I’m thrilled to introduce you to Noah Y, a longtime contributor to our community forums. Noah’s excellence lies in his eagle-eyed investigation, most recently demonstrated when he identified that NordVPN’s web protection feature was causing Firefox auto-updates to fail. Thanks to his thorough investigation, the issue was escalated, and the SUMO content team was able to create a troubleshooting article to address the issue. In the end, NordVPN was able to resolve the problem after one of our engineers filed a support ticket with their team.

… So the way I decide if it’s worth escalating is if it affects any major/popular service or website. Because then I know thousands & possibly millions of Firefox users could be hitting the same bug quietly becoming very angry or frustrated each time they run into the problem.

Q: Please tell us about yourself

I love troubleshooting tough problems. And I love working with tech. Computers, TVs, you name it. I would take apart any electronics just on a small hope I could fix them or at least clean out the tons of dust hiding in them. I’m always intrigued by cars, tech & software. Despite this big interest, I never pursued an engineering or computer science degree. Which leaves me wishing I knew how to code. But if I did, it might have become too much of an obsession since I would want to fix everything that annoys me in my favorite software. So I’m happy I didn’t go down that path.

Q: I believe you’ve been involved with Mozilla since SUMO started. Can you tell us more about how you started contributing and what motivates you to keep going until now?

That’s right. I did start way back in 2004 by testing Firefox Nightly builds on a very cool forum community called MozillaZine Forums. Everyone helped report bugs & issues that needed to be fixed. I was good at that. Seeing those bugs get fixed was very satisfying & motivating.

But I never provided true support on those forums, I just helped test & confirm other people’s bugs/issues. The community there was very engaging & still is to this day over 20 yrs later.

I think how I got started contributing to SUMO in 2008 when it first launched, was by just answering a few questions by chance & seeing what would happen. I think I also felt bad at the time there were so many questions being asked with only a few helpers. It looked overwhelming. I mostly remember a ton of questions about Firefox crashes & homepage/search engine hijacking by malware or bad add-ons.

Q: Can you describe your workflow when working on the forum? 

I try to jump around in the forums looking for missed genuine questions where the user looks really troubled but also gives a sense that they will reply. Anyone who cares enough to reply back to us once we respond is always someone I’m very interested in helping. Depending on their skills, they can also report back to us what setting, add-on or 3rd party software broke Firefox for them. So that can help us solve many more questions about the same issue.

Q: Can you share your tips and tricks for handling a difficult user on the forum? What’s your advice for other community members to avoid being overwhelmed with so many things to do?

I would say try to relate to the angry user’s frustration & let them know you understand how bad/annoying of a situation this is. I usually make it a point to let them know of past & recent issues where a website, add-on, or 3rd party software broke Firefox & that it’s not always Firefox’s fault when something breaks. There is a perception out there that every annoying issue is caused by Firefox itself or a Firefox update. This doesn’t calm down every angry user but for the reasonable users, they now understand that the blame is either shared or coming from the other side entirely.

For overwhelmed forum helpers, my advice is to reduce how many questions you respond to. I’m always surprised by how many new questions are posted daily & how I realize that not all of them are going to get solved. With that understanding, I have made my peace with only helping as many people as I can without feeling like I’m going to burnout.

Q: You have a knack in noticing a trending topic on the forum. Do you have a specific way to keep track of issues and how can you tell if an issue is worth escalating?

Thank you! I wasn’t sure if anyone else noticed that. It’s a blessing & a curse. Because once I discover a trending topic like that, I keep collecting as much info as possible & keep drilling into the details until I unlock a clue. And I won’t stop until we solve it or it’s ruled so hopeless that no one can fix it. It’s honestly like detective work.

I try to keep notes & a list of all the questions encountering the trending issue in a basic text document. Pretty old school. I may need a cooler tool to help organize & visualize this data. :) And as I keep tracking the issue & noticing more & more people appearing with the same issue, it becomes personal for me.

Because I used to be that user, suffering from some insane problem that was driving me crazy and it disrupted my work or enjoyment of the internet and absolutely nothing would solve it. When a problem becomes that severe, I realized that no one’s going to do anything about it until you start making a lot of noise & sounding the alarm bells & contacting the right people in power to help confirm, prioritize and get as many staff needed to get it fixed. Which by the way, is very awesome. As you can not easily escalate issues like this in other companies unless you are a staff member. Even then, the issue can still fall through the cracks unless you reach exactly the right person.

So the way I decide if it’s worth escalating is if it affects any major/popular service or website. Because then I know thousands & possibly millions of Firefox users could be hitting the same bug quietly becoming very angry or frustrated each time they run into the problem. Eventually they’ll become fatigued & come to the SUMO forums to vent about it or plead their desperation for getting it fixed as its ruining their lives in a lot of important areas (Can’t login to bank site, can’t watch movie/tv shows, can’t pay bills, can’t login to webmail, can’t access Medicare/Social security site, etc.). I try to proactively hunt these issues down before they become major trends. :)

Q: Given your experience, can you mention one or two things that you would consider helpful for SUMO contributors to know, based on your experience in the community forums?

That the browser is always changing & websites aren’t making sure they work in Firefox anymore. So it’s going to become more noticeable in the questions they see that certain websites are going to break more often & add-ons are going to break websites as well.

My advice would be to treat all antivirus software & all add-ons as the source of a weird issue the user is seeing. 95%+ of all problems dealing with websites not working or having a weird glitch are caused by add-ons, antivirus add-ons or the antivirus software itself intercepting all the internet traffic & blocking the wrong things causing the website to fail in Firefox.

Q: What excites you the most about Firefox development these days?

How there seems to be a refocused & dedicated effort to fix things that users are annoyed with & to build features they actually want.

Q: What are the biggest challenges you’re facing as a SUMO contributor at the moment? What would you like to see from us in the future?

SUMO is a great community and I think we just need a few more tools to reduce repetitive tasks. One idea is to be able to save personal canned responses for each forum helper so they don’t have to copy & paste them from their personal notes. Another could be to help us view a more cleanly formatted list of a user’s add-on in the System Details area. So we can take a look quickly without parsing a very large amount of JSON to find that information.

The biggest challenge I feel like is not knowing if a user had their problem resolved. Since the way people interact with forums has changed thanks to social media, they don’t really have the time to come back & post a reply. So sometimes they just give a thumbs up to our post. Which makes me wonder, does that mean my answer solved their problem? I think the thumbs up is the new way of saying your answer solved their issue. So maybe surfacing that information in a easy to see place will help me know my impact on resolving problems.

Jscher did something clever about that on his “My Questions” SUMO Contributor tool that shows a heart emoji/❤️at the top of your post if any user liked/your post.

Q: Can you tell us a story about the most rewarding moment and impactful contribution you’ve made in SUMO?

This is a tough but good question. It’s kinda hard to remember since I can’t search my answers past a certain point. But there have been a few big battles where I’ve totally forgot that I helped with. Thankfully Bugzilla has a lot of the big ones I helped solve.

One big moment was helping identify the cause of Firefox autoupdates failing for many users & they kept getting error popups about the failed updates. I could see this was going to get worse fast so I filed a bug and included as much of my findings as I could. And a Firefox dev (the awesome Nick Alexander) confirmed my findings & escalated the bug to NordVPN. It took a while (3 weeks) but NordVPN finally fixed it.

I think the most impactful contribution was giving feedback & filing bugs about site enhancements, moderation tools and site usability to SUMO over the years to make it easier & more productive for users, contributors and moderators to use the site. Special shout out to the team who originally built SUMO & helped build all our ideas into reality: Kadir Topal, Ricky Rosario, Mike Cooper, Will Kahn-Greene and Rehan Dalal. I really couldn’t have gotten anything done without this amazing team.

Q: You’ve had a few chances to meet with SUMO staff and other contributors in the past. Can you tell us more about the most productive in-person event or meeting you’ve had? What value did you get from these events?

These in-person events have been amazing. Maybe I can even say life changing because I was able to meet genuinely good people that I was able to call friends and some best friends. From what I’ve seen, Mozilla has the tendency to attract very smart people but also ones who help develop you into a better person through all the interactions you have with them.

Q: What advice would you give to someone new who wants to contribute to SUMO?

Take your time contributing. You don’t have to rush out a specific number of answers or KB article edits a day. You don’t even have to volunteer to help every day of the week. Work at your own pace. Either super slow, regular slow or just average speed. The Knowledge Base where all our support articles live will always be there. So you don’t have to rush to 100% completion to translate them to your locale. And on the forum side, the amount of questions that come to the SUMO platform are endless. Worse than that, not everyone you provide an answer to will respond back. So you may have wasted a lot of time customizing & curating a really good answer for someone, just to have them never respond at all or just put a simple thumbs down vote on your post. That’s happened to me quite a few times & I didn’t love it. So you could use my motto: Quality over quantity. A few quality posts here & there over posting 50 quick answers to which no one might reply.

That strategy/mantra will help you from burning out quickly.

And to counteract that missing feeling of engagement, I cherry pick forum questions that I think have a higher chance of reply based on how the person has stated their problem & if they seem invested in getting an answer. It’s tricky to do & you don’t always get it right. But developing this skill over time can help you respond to better people who will engage back with you & actually let you know if your advice helped or failed them. Which is where I get the most satisfaction from.

I hope you enjoy your read. If you’re interested in joining our product community just like Noah, please go to our contribute page to learn more. You can also reach out to us through the following channels:

SUMO contributor discussions: https://support.mozilla.org/forums/
SUMO Matrix room: https://matrix.to/#/#sumo:mozilla.org
Twitter/X: https://x.com/SUMO_Mozilla

 

 

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — VIDEO: The Thunderbird Council

The Thunderbird Council is an important part of the Thunderbird story, and one of the main reasons we’re still around. In this month’s office hours, we sat down to chat with one of the very first Thunderbird Council members, Patrick Cloke, and one of the newest, Danny Colin, to discuss what this key group does and offers advice for those thinking about running in future elections.

Next month, we’ll put out a call for questions on social media and on the relevant TopicBox mailing lists for our next Office Hours, which will feature Ryan Sipes, Managing Director of Product at MZLA and Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation!

September Office Hours: The Thunderbird Council

While Thunderbird has been around almost 20 years, the Council hasn’t always been a part of it. In 2012, Mozilla discontinued support for Thunderbird as a product, but our community stepped in. In 2014, core contributors met in Toronto and elected the first Thunderbird Council to guide the project. For many years, the council was responsible for the day-to-day responsibilities, including development, budgeting, and hiring. While MZLA now handles those operations, the council has an even more crucial role. In the video, Danny and Patrick explain how the modern-day council works with MZLA and serves as the community’s voice.

Want to know more about what council members do, or who can run for council? Our guests provide honest and encouraging answers to these questions. Basically, if you’re an active contributor who cares about Thunderbird, you might consider running!

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

We’re so grateful to Danny and Patrick for joining us! We hope this video helps explain more about the Thunderbird Council’s role, and even encourages some of you who are active Thunderbird contributors to consider running in the future. And if you’re not an active contributor yet, go to our website to learn how to get involved!

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Thunderbird Council Resources:

The post VIDEO: The Thunderbird Council appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Mozilla Add-ons Blog — Help select new Firefox Recommended Extensions — join the Community Advisory Board

Firefox Recommended Extensions comprise a collection of featured content that’s been curated with extensive community involvement. It’s time once again to form a new Recommended Extensions Community Advisory Board and launch a fresh curatorial project. The project goal is to identify a new batch of exceptional extensions that should be considered for the Recommended program (Firefox desktop and Android).

Participation on the Community Advisory Board is a great opportunity to make a major impact with millions of users. More than 25% of all Firefox extension installs are from the Recommended set.

Past board members have included developers, designers, or simply power users. Technical skills are not required, but a passion and appreciation for great extensions are.

The evaluation process focuses on extension functionality (does it perform exceptionally well?), user experience (is it elegant and intuitive to operate?), or otherwise distinct characteristics (does it offer a unique feature or reimagine a familiar utility in a fresh way?). The project will last six months and participation is as simple as trying out a few extensions per month and offering feedback.

October 18 application deadline!

If you’re interested in contributing your perspective to the Recommended Extensions curatorial process, please complete this form by October 18th. Thank you!

The post Help select new Firefox Recommended Extensions — join the Community Advisory Board appeared first on Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog.

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Maximize Your Day: Extend Your Productivity with Add-ons

Thunderbird and its features help you do things. Crossing things off your to-do list means getting your time and energy back. Using Thunderbird and its Add-ons for productivity? Now that’s how you take your workflow to the next level.

One of Thunderbird’s biggest strengths is its vibrant, community-driven Add-ons. Many of those Add-ons are all about helping you get more out of Thunderbird. We asked our community what Add-ons they were using and would recommend to readers in this post. And did our community respond! You can read all of the recommendations from our community on Mastodon, Reddit, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.

We’re grateful for all the recommendations and for all of our Add-on developers! They put their personal time into making Thunderbird even more incredible through their extensions. The Add-ons in this list are only a small, small subset of all the active ones. We highly encourage you to check out the whole wide world of Add-ons out there.

(And if you’re wondering, I’ve downloaded Quicktext and Markdown Here Revival for my own workflow.)

Add-Ons to Try Today: Folders and Accounts

Border Colors D – Having all your email accounts in one app is already a productivity boost. What’s not productive is accidentally sending a message from the wrong account. Border Colors D allows you to assign a color and other visual indicators to the New Message window for each account. If you’re a “power user with many accounts [who] can’t afford an oops when you send with the wrong source address,” this is the Add-on for you.

Quick Folder Move – Sorting messages into folders is a great way to keep the information in your email organized. (We love using folders to sort our inbox down to zero!) This Add-on brings up a search bar or your recent folders, and allows you to move messages with ease – especially if you have a lot of folders

Add-ons to Try Today: Inbox Views and Message Composition

Thunderbird Conversations – When “you need to see quickly all received and sent mails…very important in a context of a shared mail box,” a conversation view is great. While that view is something we’d love to see built in to Thunderbird, there’s work on our underlying database we need to do first. But this Add-on brings that view to Thunderbird, and to your inbox, now.

Markdown Here Revival – Is Markdown part of your productivity and workflow toolbox? This Add-on will allow you to write emails in Markdown and send them as HTML with the click of a button! One of our recommenders said this Add-on is “absolutely mandatory.”

For those of you wanting to build on the power of templates, we have two Add-ons to mention. Quicktext is more for everyday users, and SmartTemplates is intended for the power users out there. Reducing the time and energy you spend on repetitive messages is a productivity gamechanger. We’re thrilled to have two Add-ons that can help users, whether they’ve been using Thunderbird for 2 months or 20 years.

Send Later – Sometimes, part of your productivity routine involves scheduling things to be sent later. Or, as the recommendation added, you don’t want your boss to know you were working on something at 2 am. This add-on adds true send later functionality to Thunderbird, so you decide when that message gets sent, whether it’s one time or regularly. (But really, night owls, sleep is good!)

Our community loves Nostalgy++, especially on Reddit. Nostalgy++ brings the power of keyboard shortcuts to Thunderbird to let you manage, search, and archive emails. One user says they save hours every week thanks to Nostalgy++’s keybindings.

Add-Ons to Test Today!

A few of our community’s favorite Add-ons are in beta testing for their fully 128-compatible versions, as of September 2024. Testing is one of the best and most beginner-friendly ways to contribute to Thunderbird. If you’d like to boost your productivity AND make a developer’s day, we have an Add-on we’d encourage you to check out.

Remove Duplicate Message is another Add-on that is also seeking beta testers for their 128-compatible version. For anyone who has ever dealt with replies to a “catch-all” email address or anything else cluttering their inbox with duplicates, this Add-on can take care of those copies for you. Check out their latest release and provide feedback on their GitHub Issues.

The post Maximize Your Day: Extend Your Productivity with Add-ons appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Open Policy & Advocacy — Managing Misuse Risk for Dual-Use Foundation Models — Mozilla Submits Comments to NIST

In July 2024, the U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI), under the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released draft guidance on Managing Misuse Risk for Dual-Use Foundation Models. This draft, intended for public comment, is focused specifically on foundation models – the largest and most advanced AI models available – and namely those built by closed model developers in big tech labs. The AI Safety Institute’s framework laid out in the document “focuses on managing the risk that models will be deliberately misused to cause harm…”

According to NIST’s AISI, the document is meant to build on the existing AI Risk Management Framework (to which Mozilla provided comments) to address both the technical and social aspects of misuse risks by providing best practices for organizations.

Mozilla takes seriously its role as a steward of good practices, especially when it comes to protecting open-source, privacy, and fighting for the principles in Mozilla’s Manifesto. We’ve led the way in advancing safer and more trustworthy AI, releasing an in-depth report on Creating Trustworthy AI in 2020 and bringing together forty AI leaders to discuss critical questions related to openness and AI at the 2024 Columbia Convening. As such, Mozilla encourages legislators and regulators to do their part and protect the interests of individuals and to make technology more useful and accessible for all.

However, while the AISI draft guidelines do an excellent job in highlighting the theoretical risks posed by foundation models created by large and largely private developers, it takes a narrow view of the way AI is developed today, including at the current technology frontier. In our full comments, we focused on encouraging the AISI to expand the lens through which it examines how AI is developed today. In particular, we believe that the AISI should work to ensure that its guidelines are adapted to take into account the unique nature of open source. Below is a list of highlights from Mozilla’s comments on the existing draft:

  • The current draft focuses on AI services deployed on the internet and accessed through some interface or API. The reality is that the majority of AI research and development is occurring on locally deployed AI models that are collaboratively developed and freely distributed. NIST should rework the draft’s front matter and glossary to better capture the state of the AI ecosystem.
  • The practices outlined in the draft place a disproportionate burden on any AI developer outside of the small handful of very large AI companies. Mozilla believes that NIST should ensure that requirements are applicable to organizations of all sizes and capability levels, and should take into account the potential negative impact of misuse at different organizational scales.
  • The recommendations for implementing the practices outlined in the draft imply that the AI model is centrally controlled and deployed. Open-source and collaborative development environments don’t align with this approach, rendering this guidance inapplicable, unhelpful, or at worst – harmful. Given the strong evidentiary basis for open-source helping mitigate risk and make software safer, NIST should ensure open-source AI is considered and supported in its work.
  • The document should define “gradients of access” as a way to provide a framework for AI risk management discussions and decision making. These gradients should represent incremental steps of access to an AI model (e.g. chat interface, prompt injection, training, direct weights visibility, local download, etc.) and each should be accompanied by its associated risks.

We hope that the AI Safety Institute continues to build on its foundational work in the field and works to develop guidelines, recommendations, and best practices that will not only stand the test of time but take into account the broader field of participants in the AI ecosystem. When such regulations are well designed, they propel the AI sector towards a safer and more trustworthy future. Mozilla’s full comments on Managing Misuse Risk for Dual-Use Foundation Models can be found here.

The post Managing Misuse Risk for Dual-Use Foundation Models — Mozilla Submits Comments to NIST appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird and Spam

Dealing with spam in our daily email routines can be frustrating, but Thunderbird has some tools to make unwanted messages less of a headache. It takes time, training, and patience, but eventually you can emerge victorious over that junk mail. In this article we’ll explain how Thunderbird’s spam filter works, and how to tune it for the most effective results.

What Powers Thunderbird’s Spam Filter?

Thunderbird’s adaptive filter uses one of the oldest methods around — a Bayes algorithm — to help decide which messages should be marked as junk. But in order to work efficiently and reliably, it also needs a little help from you.

Thunderbird’s documentation and support community have always mentioned that the spam filter needs some human intervention, but I never understood why until researching how a Bayes algorithm works.

Why A Bayes Algorithm Needs Your Help

It’s helpful to think about Thunderbird’s spam filter as a sort of inbox detective, but you’re instrumental in training it and making it smarter. That’s because a Bayes algorithm calculates the odds that an email is spam based on the words it contains, and uses past experience to make an educated guess.

Here’s an example: you receive an email that contains the words “Urgent, act now to claim your free prize!” The algorithm checks to see how frequently those words appear in known spam messages compared to known good messages. If it detects those words (especially ones like “free” and “prize,”) are frequently in messages you’ve marked as spam, but not present in good messages, it will mark it as junk.

This is why it’s equally important to mark messages as “Not Junk.” Then, it learns to recognize “good” words that are common across non-spam emails. And for each message you mark, the probability that Thunderbird’s spam filter accurately identifies spam only increases.

Of course, it’s not perfect. A message you mark as junk might not consistently be marked as junk. A reliable, fail-safe way to ensure certain messages are marked as junk is to create filters manually.

Do you want to ensure important messages are never marked as junk? Try whitelisting.

Since junk mail patterns are always changing, it’s a good idea to regularly train Thunderbird. Without frequent training, it may not provide great results.

Junk Filter Settings

Now that we understand what powers Thunderbird’s junk filter, let’s look at how to manage the settings, and how to train Thunderbird for more consistent results.

Global Junk Settings

Junk filtering is enabled by default, but you can fine-tune what should happen to messages marked as junk using the global settings. These settings apply to all email accounts, though some can be overridden in the Per Account Settings.

  1. Click the menu button (≡) > Settings > Privacy & Security.
  2. Scroll down to Junk and adjust the settings to your preference.

Per Account Settings

The junk settings for each of your email accounts will override similar settings in the Global Settings.

  1. Click the menu button (≡) > Account Settings > Your email address > Junk Settings.

How to Turn Off Thunderbird’s Adaptive Filtering

To disable Thunderbird’s adaptive junk mail controls:

  • Uncheck Enable adaptive junk mail controls for this account.

Whitelisting

Under Do not automatically mark mail as junk if the sender is in, you can select address books to use as a whitelist. Senders whose email addresses are in a whitelisted address book won’t be automatically marked as junk. However, you can still manually mark a message from a whitelisted sender as junk.

Enabling whitelisting is recommended to help ensure messages from people you care about are not marked as junk.

Training the Junk Filter

This part is important: for Thunderbird’s junk filter to be effective, you must train it to recognize both junk and non-junk messages. If you only do one or the other, the filter won’t be very effective.

It’s important to mark messages as junk before deleting them. Just deleting a message doesn’t train the filter.

Tell Thunderbird What IS Junk

There are several ways to mark messages as junk:

  • Press J on your keyboard to mark one or more selected messages as junk.

Once you mark a message as junk, if you’ve configured your Global Junk Settings or Per Account Settings to move junk email to a different folder, the email will disappear from the Message List Pane. Don’t worry, the email has moved to the folder you’ve configured for junk mail.

Thunderbird’s junk filter is designed to learn from the training data you provide. Marking more messages as Junk or Not Junk will improve the accuracy of your junk filter by adding more training data.

Tell Thunderbird What is NOT Junk

Sometimes Thunderbird’s junk filter might mark good messages as junk. It’s important to tell the filter which messages are not junk, especially on a new installation of Thunderbird.

Note: Frequently (daily or weekly) check your Junk folder for good messages wrongly marked as junk and mark them as Not Junk. This will recover the good messages and improve the filter’s accuracy.

There are several ways to mark messages as Not Junk:

  • Click the Not Junk button in the yellow junk notification below the message header in the Message List Pane:
  • Click the red junk icon in the Junk column of the Message List Pane to toggle the junk status of a message:
  • Press Shift+J on your keyboard to mark one or more messages as Not Junk.

Once you unmark a message as junk, it will disappear from the current folder but will return to its original folder.

Repeated Training

Regularly train the filter by marking several good messages as not junk. This includes messages in your inbox and those filtered into other folders. Use the keyboard shortcut Shift+J for this, as the Not Junk button only appears for messages already marked as junk. Marking several messages per week will be sufficient, and you can select many messages to mark all at once.

Unfortunately, the user interface doesn’t indicate whether a message has already been marked as “not junk.”

Other Ways to Block Unwanted Messages

Thunderbird’s adaptive junk filter is not an absolute barrier against messages from specific addresses or types of messages. You can use stronger mechanisms to block unwanted messages:

Create Filters Manually

You can manually:

Use an External Filter Service

You can also use an external filter service to help classify email and block junk:

  1. Click the menu button (≡) > Account Settings > Your Account > Junk Settings.
  2. Enable the Trust junk mail headers set by option.
  3. Choose an external filter service from the drop-down menu.

The post Thunderbird and Spam appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Thunderbird for Android/ K-9 Mail: July and August 2024 Progress Report

We’re back for an update on Thunderbird for Android/K-9 Mail, combining progress reports for July and August. Did you miss our June update? Check it out! The focus over these two months has been on quality over quantity—behind each improvement is significant groundwork that reduces our technical debt and makes future feature work easier to tackle.

Material 3 Update

As we head  towards the release of Thunderbird for Android, we want you to feel like you are using Thunderbird, and not just any email client. As part of that, we’ve made significant strides toward compatibility with Material 3 to better control coloring and give you a native feel. What do you think so far?

The final missing piece is the navigation drawer, which we believe will land in September. We’ve heard your feedback that the unread emails have been a bit hard to see, especially in dark mode, and have made a few other color tweaks to accompany it.

Feature Modules

If you’ve considered contributing as a developer to Thunderbird for Android, you may have  noticed many intertwined code modules that are hard to tackle without intricate knowledge of the application. To lower the barrier of entry, we’re continuing the move to a feature module system and have been refactoring code to use them. This shift improves maintainability and opens the door for unique features specific to Thunderbird for Android.

Ready to Play

Having a separate Thunderbird for Android app requires some setup in various app-stores, as well as changes to how apps are signed. While this isn’t the fun feature work you’d be excited to hear about, it is foundational to getting Thunderbird for Android out of the door. We’re almost ready to play, just a few legal checkboxes we need to tick.

Documentation

 K-9 Mail user documentation has become outdated, still referencing older versions like K-9 Mail 6.4. Given our current resources, we’ve paused updates to the guide, but if you’re passionate about improving documentation, we’d love your help to bring it back online! If you are interested in maintaining our user documentation, please reach out on the K-9 Forums.

Community Contributions

We’ve had a bunch of great contributions come in! Do you want to see your name here next time? Learn how to contribute.

The post Thunderbird for Android/ K-9 Mail: July and August 2024 Progress Report appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog — Why Use a Mail Client vs Webmail

Many of us Thunderbird users often forget just how convenient using a mail client can be. But as webmail has become more popular over the last decade, some new users might not know the difference between the two, and why you would want to swap your browser for a dedicated app.

In today’s digital world, email remains a cornerstone of personal and professional communication. Managing emails, however, can be a daunting task especially when you have multiple email accounts with multiple service providers to check and keep track of. Thankfully, decades ago someone invented the email client application. While web-based solutions have taken off in recent years, they can’t quite replace the need for managing emails in one dedicated place.

Let’s go back to the basics: What is the difference between an email service provider and an email client application? And more importantly, can we make a compelling case for why an email client like Thunderbird is not just relevant in today’s world, but essential in maintaining productivity and sanity in our fast-paced lives?

An email service provider (ESP) is a company that offers services for sending, receiving, and storing emails. Popular examples include Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Proton Mail. These services offer web-based interfaces, allowing users to access their emails from any device with an internet connection.

On the other hand, an email client application is software installed on your device that allows you to manage any or all of those email accounts in one dedicated app. Examples include Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, and Apple Mail. Email clients offer a unified platform to access multiple email accounts, calendars, tasks, and contacts, all in one place. They retrieve emails from your ESP using protocols like IMAP or POP3 and provide advanced features for organizing, searching, and composing emails.

Despite the convenience of web-based email services, email client applications play a huge role in enhancing productivity and efficiency. Webmail is a juggling game of switching tabs, logins, and sometimes wildly different interfaces. This fragmented approach can steal your time and your focus.

So, how can an email client help with all of that?

One Inbox – All Your Accounts

As already mentioned, an email client eliminates the need to switch between different browser tabs or sign in and out of accounts. Combine your Gmail, Yahoo, and other accounts so you can read, reply to, and search through the emails using a single application. For even greater convenience, you can opt for a unified inbox view, where emails from all your different accounts are combined into a single inbox.

Work Offline – Anywhere

Email clients store your emails locally on your device, so you can access and compose emails even without an internet connection. This is really useful when you’re travelling or in areas with poor connectivity. You can draft responses, organize your inbox, and synchronize your changes once you’re back online.

Thunderbird email client

Enhanced Productivity

Email clients come packed with features designed to boost productivity. These include advanced search capabilities across multiple accounts, customizable filters and rules, as well as integration with calendar and task management tools. Features like email templates and delayed sending can streamline your workflow even more.

Care About Privacy?

Email clients offer enhanced security features, such as encryption and digital signatures, to protect your sensitive information. With local storage, you have more control over your data compared to relying solely on a web-based ESP.

No More Clutter and Distractions

Web-based email services often come with ads, sometimes disguised as emails, and other distractions. Email clients, on the other hand, provide a cleaner ad-free experience. It’s just easier to focus with a dedicated application just for email. Not having to reply on a browser for this purpose means less chance of getting sidetracked by latest news, social media, and random Google searches.

All Your Calendars in One Place

Last but not least, managing your calendar, or multiple calendars, is easier with an email client. You can sync calendars from various accounts, set reminders, and schedule meetings all in one place. This is particularly useful when handling calendar invites from different accounts, as it allows you to easily shift meetings between calendars or maintain one main calendar to avoid double booking.

Calendar view in Thunderbird

So, if you’re not already using an email client, perhaps this post has given you a few good reasons to at least try it out. An email client can help you organize your busy digital life, keep all your email and calendar accounts in one place, and even draft emails during your next transatlantic flight with non-existent or questionable Wi-Fi.

And just as email itself has evolved over the past decades, so have email client applications. They’ll adapt to modern trends and get enhanced with the latest features and integrations to keep everyone organized and productive – in 2024 and beyond.

The post Why Use a Mail Client vs Webmail appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

The Bugzilla Update — Check the Bugzilla website for up-to-date Bugzilla news

A year or so ago we redesigned our main website at https://www.bugzilla.org/ . The new site has a blog with an RSS feed available, so to avoid duplication of effort, news posts will be getting put there from now on.

So go check out the news page at https://www.bugzilla.org/blog !

Hint: We just released new versions of Bugzilla, and you can read about it there!