22 Jul 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Thunderbird Blog: Thunderbird 153 “Meadow” is out now!

As we head into the summer months, a new Extended Support Release (ESR) is in full bloom. Thunderbird 153 "Meadow" is out now, and from all of us at MZLA, the Thunderbird Council, and our global community of contributors, we can't wait for you to try it out.

"Meadow" builds on Thunderbird 140 "Eclipse," along with the steady stream of features and improvements that have landed in the Monthly Release channel over the past year. This release makes first-time setup smoother with a redesigned Account Hub, brings native Microsoft Exchange support out into the open, and lets Thunderbird take on the colors of your desktop. Add privacy-minded networking, friendlier notifications, and a healthy crop of refinements, and Meadow is ready to grow with you.

Easier Account Creation

The all-new Account Hub makes setting up accounts faster and more intuitive than ever, with improved autodiscover, automatic protocol detection, and automatic setup of connected calendars and address books.

Address Book Setup

The new Account Hub modal lets you set up all types of local and remote address books. Existing email accounts are automatically scanned to detect available address books that haven't been configured yet.

Microsoft Exchange Support

We've added full support for Exchange email servers via Exchange Web Services: set up Microsoft Exchange accounts natively to read, manage, and write emails, no add-ons required. Experimental Microsoft Graph support is already in core but temporarily disabled behind a preference while we finish it, with full support plus Calendar and Address Book integration aimed for later this year.

Accent Colors

Meadow now inherits your operating system's accent color to match your preferred look. You can also customize your colors with the new accent color settings in the Appearance tab.

Do More From Your Notifications

Mark an email as read, delete it, flag it as spam, and more right from the native notifications on your operating system.

In addition to these headline features, there's a whole host of other updates you'll love, including:

OAuth in Browser

Thunderbird now supports OAuth authentication directly in your default browser.

Login With Thundermail

If you have a Thundermail account, you can sign in to Thunderbird with one-click authentication in the Account Hub.

Folder Sorting

Improvements An improved UI and better visual indicators make sorting your emails easier than ever.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

Thousands of bug fixes and performance improvements bring you the smooth, reliable Thunderbird experience you expect.

Looking Forward

Thunderbird 153 "Meadow" might seem soothing and calm, but we're excited to get these features into your hands. And if you'd like updates like these more often, there's no need to wait for the annual release: switching to Thunderbird Release gets you new updates on a monthly basis.

Thunderbird 153 Availability for Windows, Linux, and macOS

Even with QA and beta testing, any major software release may have issues that only surface after significant public use. That's why we're rolling out automatic updates gradually, enabling them more broadly as we confirm everything is stable.

Manual upgrade to 153 is now enabled via Help > About - you can upgrade now or wait to receive automatic updates. Thunderbird 153.0 is also offered as a direct download from thunderbird.net. Be sure to select 'Thunderbird Extended Support Release' in the 'Release Channel' drop-down menu.

For Linux users running Thunderbird from the Snap or Flatpak, 153 will be available within the next few weeks. Likewise, Thunderbird 153 will arrive on the Microsoft Store by mid-July.

Full release notes can be found here.

If you have any issues, please reach out to support.

Have an idea? We want to hear it! Submit your ideas here.

The post Thunderbird 153 "Meadow" is out now! appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

22 Jul 2026 9:45pm GMT

Firefox Tooling Announcements: July 22nd Deploy

The latest version of PerfCompare is now live!

Check out the change-log below to see the updates:

[kala-moz]

[moijes]

[sumairq]

Thank you for the contributions!

Bugs or feature requests can be filed on Bugzilla. The team can also be found on the #perfcompare channel on Element. Come and chat!

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22 Jul 2026 5:36pm GMT

This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 661

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @thisweekinrust.bsky.social on Bluesky or @ThisWeekinRust on mastodon.social, or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub and archives can be viewed at this-week-in-rust.org. If you find any errors in this week's issue, please submit a PR.

Want TWIR in your inbox? Subscribe here.

Updates from Rust Community

Official
Newsletters
Project/Tooling Updates
Observations/Thoughts
Rust Walkthroughs

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is xan, a TUI toolkit to work with CSV files.

Thanks to Simeon H.K. Fitch for the suggestion!

Please submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Calls for Testing

An important step for RFC implementation is for people to experiment with the implementation and give feedback, especially before stabilization.

If you are a feature implementer and would like your RFC to appear in this list, add a call-for-testing label to your RFC along with a comment providing testing instructions and/or guidance on which aspect(s) of the feature need testing.

No calls for testing were issued this week by Rust, Cargo, Rustup or Rust language RFCs.

Let us know if you would like your feature to be tracked as a part of this list.

Call for Participation; projects and speakers

CFP - Projects

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but did not know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!

Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.

If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here or through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on Bluesky or Mastodon!

CFP - Events

Are you a new or experienced speaker looking for a place to share something cool? This section highlights events that are being planned and are accepting submissions to join their event as a speaker.

If you are an event organizer hoping to expand the reach of your event, please submit a link to the website through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on Bluesky or Mastodon!

Updates from the Rust Project

576 pull requests were merged in the last week

Compiler
Library
Cargo
Rustdoc
Clippy
Rust-Analyzer
Rust Compiler Performance Triage

The two most notable changes this week were #159115, which resulted in pretty nice instruction count wins for full incremental builds on several benchmarks, and #159091, which enabled PGO for rustdoc, which makes it ~3-4% faster across the board.

There were two large rollups with tiny performance regressions, which made it difficult to find the offending PRs.

Triage done by @Kobzol. Revision range: 5503df87..d527bc9b

Summary:

(instructions:u) mean range count
Regressions ❌
(primary)		 0.4% [0.2%, 1.0%] 40
Regressions ❌
(secondary)		 0.7% [0.2%, 4.6%] 69
Improvements ✅
(primary)		 -2.0% [-6.2%, -0.2%] 136
Improvements ✅
(secondary)		 -2.6% [-8.4%, -0.2%] 119
All ❌✅ (primary) -1.4% [-6.2%, 1.0%] 176

2 Regressions, 3 Improvements, 6 Mixed; 4 of them in rollups 34 artifact comparisons made in total

Full report here.

Approved RFCs

Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:

Final Comment Period

Every week, the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now.

Tracking Issues & PRs

Rust

Compiler Team (MCPs only)

Leadership Council

Unsafe Code Guidelines

No Items entered Final Comment Period this week for Cargo, Language Reference, Language Team or Rust RFCs.

Let us know if you would like your PRs, Tracking Issues or RFCs to be tracked as a part of this list.

New and Updated RFCs

Upcoming Events

Rusty Events between 2026-07-22 - 2026-08-19 🦀

Virtual
Africa
Asia
Europe
North America
Oceania
South America

If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Please remember to add a link to the event too. Email the Rust Community Team for access.

Jobs

Please see the latest Who's Hiring thread on r/rust

Quote of the Week

We were planning on publishing a blog post announcing this at the same time as making the repo public, but ran out of private repo CI usage 😭.

- Carl Lerche on r/rust about the launch of topcoat

Despite a lamentable lack of suggestions, llogiq is glad to have found this quote.

Please submit quotes and vote for next week!

This Week in Rust is edited by:

Email list hosting is sponsored by The Rust Foundation

Discuss on r/rust

22 Jul 2026 4:00am GMT

21 Jul 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Firefox Developer Experience: Firefox WebDriver Newsletter 153

WebDriver is a remote control interface that enables introspection and control of user agents. As such, it can help developers to verify that their websites are working and performing well with all major browsers. The protocol is standardized by the W3C and consists of two separate specifications: WebDriver classic (HTTP) and the new WebDriver BiDi (Bi-Directional).

This newsletter gives an overview of the work we've done as part of the Firefox 153 release cycle.

Contributions

Firefox is an open source project, and we are always happy to receive external code contributions to our WebDriver implementation. We want to give special thanks to everyone who filed issues, bugs and submitted patches.

Firefox 153, multiple WebDriver bugs were fixed by contributors:

WebDriver code is written in JavaScript, Python, and Rust so any web developer can contribute! Read how to setup the work environment and check the list of mentored issues for Marionette, or the list of mentored JavaScript bugs for WebDriver BiDi. Join our chatroom if you need any help to get started!

All Changes

A complete list of developer-facing changes included in this Firefox release is available in the MDN Firefox 153 Release Notes.

21 Jul 2026 8:18pm GMT

The Mozilla Blog: Your Android tabs just got a lot more organized with Firefox

Tabs pile up fast on mobile. Imagine you're planning a summer barbecue, and you start by searching for the best rib recipe. Twenty minutes later, you're 17 tabs deep: comparing marinades, debating side dishes, checking the weather, making a grocery list and adding songs to a playlist.

None of those tabs are organized. They're mixed in with everything else you've been browsing, making it hard to keep track of what you're saving for later.

Now you can group related tabs in Firefox for Android, keeping them together in labeled, colored groups so you can actually find what you need when you need it.

Animation showing related tabs being grouped together in Firefox for Android, then displayed as a single labeled tab group in the tab tray.

How it works

Drag one tab onto another, or select a few and tap "Add to group." Name it, pick a color, and you're done.

Each group appears as a single card in the tab tray rather than a dozen separate tabs. You can open it, rename it, recolor it, or delete it whenever you want. Search still finds tabs inside a group, too.

Illustration of Tab Groups in Firefox for Android, showing tabs being grouped, named and color-coded, then displayed together in a single organized group.

So when you're standing in the produce aisle looking for that rib recipe, you won't have to scroll past dozens of unrelated tabs just to find it. Everything for your barbecue is organized together in one place, ready when you need it.

Finally sorted, as it should be

Tab grouping was the most requested feature from Firefox mobile users in 2025. And we get it: your tabs shouldn't get harder to manage the more you use your browser. Download the latest version of Firefox for Android now to try Tab Groups, with iOS support on the way.

The post Your Android tabs just got a lot more organized with Firefox appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

21 Jul 2026 4:00pm GMT

The Mozilla Blog: Quick Answers: For the questions in between

You're planning a trip. Reading an article. Following a recipe.

Then a question pops into your head. Sometimes it leads down a rabbit hole - with more searches, more tabs and plenty to explore. Other times, you just need a little context so you can get back to what you were doing.

That's why we're introducing Quick Answers for Firefox on iOS.

With Quick Answers, you can ask a question using your voice and get a concise answer. Just open a new tab, long-press the voice button and ask.

For example:

If a quick answer is all you need, you're done.

If you want to dig in deeper, the links to supporting sources are there for exploration.

Built with transparency and privacy in mind

We've built Quick Answers to be transparent about how it works and what data is shared.

Voice is processed on your device using Apple's speech recognition technology. No raw audio is stored or sent to the server, and Firefox doesn't share your browsing history or personal context with the AI model. Only the transcribed text of your question is sent to generate an answer. You can turn the feature off at any time in Settings → AI Controls.

Quick Answers is starting to roll out today to Firefox for iOS users in the U.S. using English.

Oh, and if you're wondering…

The Firefox logo

Take control of your internet

Download Firefox

The post Quick Answers: For the questions in between appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

21 Jul 2026 4:00pm GMT

The Mozilla Blog: Experience Better Browsing: Introducing Native Containers in Firefox 153

Today, we're excited to announce the Preview of Containers in Firefox version 153, which lets you keep separate parts of your online life (work, shopping, personal, banking) logged into different accounts in the same browser window, but keeps your cookies and ad tracking isolated inside each container.

This means that stuff you do in one container isn't seen by other containers. No longer will you search for a new hat to wear to a party, only to be inundated with ads for hats at every twist and turn on the internet for weeks to come.

For almost a decade, many of you have relied on our Multi-Account Containers extension to keep work, personal, and privacy-sensitive browsing separate without needing multiple browsers or profiles.

We've heard your feedback and understood the value you find in that separation. Now, we're bringing the power of the Multi-Account Containers extension directly into the heart of Firefox for all to benefit from.

Why bring Containers into Firefox?

Whether you're managing multiple social media accounts, separating work projects from personal shopping, or simply keeping your banking activity distinct, Containers are designed to help you organize your digital space. By making Containers a native, first-party feature in Firefox 153, we are:

What to expect in the Preview

In this preview release, you can:

If you're already using the Multi-Account Containers, there's nothing special you need to do. Not all of the features of the add-on are available in the first-party version of containers just yet, we're still building them out. You can continue to use the add-on alongside the built in containers, no need to uninstall the add-on.

This release represents our first step in making Firefox more adaptable to how you actually live and work online. While this is just the beginning, we have plans to refine this experience and build a foundation for future features that make context separation even more seamless.


Join the Conversation

We're eager to hear how this native experience fits into your daily routine. As you explore the new Containers Preview in Firefox 153, please let us know what you think by posting your feedback in this Mozilla Connect thread. Your feedback helps us shape the future of these tools and ensures we're building features that truly matter to you.

The Firefox logo

Take control of your internet

Download Firefox

The post Experience Better Browsing: Introducing Native Containers in Firefox 153 appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

21 Jul 2026 4:00pm GMT

Firefox Tooling Announcements: Firefox Profiler Deployment (July 21, 2026)

The latest version of the Firefox Profiler is now live! Check out the full changelog below to see what's changed:

Highlights:

Other Changes:

Big thanks to our amazing localizers for making this release possible:

Find out more about the Firefox Profiler on profiler.firefox.com! If you have any questions, join the discussion on our Matrix channel!

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21 Jul 2026 12:44pm GMT

Martin Thompson: Why in Building Protocols, Like Code, Starting Over Is Dumb

Today, the IETF held the CURRENT BoF, where the goal was to develop a new protocol. That protocol would be substantially like TLS, reusing its record layer and basic structure, but it would drop in MLS for key exchange.

This is somewhere between a pretty bad idea and a horrible idea.

The wholesale replacement of a huge chunk of protocol architectures is a hallmark of a lot of the AI-generated protocol proposals that have flooded the IETF. A small blemish is identified, then the fix is a whole new protocol, or a major piece of surgery. No regard for the wisdom of Chesterton's Fence or the accumulated knowledge and usefulness embodied in what exists.

Experienced engineers know that rewriting a code module is not something you do lightly. There's lots of literature out there about why this is a bad idea generally, and some emerging discussion about how AI might just change that.

The reasons not to rewrite a software component still largely apply to a protocol component. The reasons that AI might make it easier to do that safely, less so. Protocols are different.

Wholesale Change Will Miss Use Cases

Just like with a code change, a protocol component that changes will miss use cases that people really care about.

The usual concerns with code apply:

Unlike code changes, you probably don't have a test case for existing features that you didn't know about. We found that with HTTP/2, where a number of use cases got lost in the process of "upgrading" HTTP.

In HTTP/1.1, performing client authentication in the middle of request was possible. Losing that capability in HTTP/2 affected few enough people that it was not badly damaging for the ecosystem. It still sucked.

A lot of work was done to try to find these issues, but we did not learn about these problems until fairly late in the process.

Proposing a protocol change means asking a whole lot of other people, many of whom are not invested in your goals, to do that work.

Changing a protocol by replacing a chunk of it, no matter how much care is taken, either asks the entire ecosystem to change with you.

That means asking everyone to move with you. If they don't, you are not changing the protocol, you are forking it.

Forking A Protocol Destroys Interoperability

The real value of having a protocol like TLS is that a great many things can all talk to each other.

Forking a protocol - and sometimes profiling a protocol, a subject for another post - destroys that. You now have two ways to achieve the same goal, and a choice to join one of two clubs. You can join both, but that means constantly translating back and forth, something that can only get harder over time as protocol semantics diverge.

And yes, in case you were asking, this applies to the entirety of the IETF IoT sphere, which has parallel HTTP, TLS, and other analogues. Ostensibly, these address the needs of highly constrained hardware, but the cost is an ecosystem cut off from the mainstream.

But Fixing Protocols Is Hard

Yes, existing protocols come with baggage or technical debt. Maybe they aren't perfectly optimized for your use.

The value that an existing protocol carries is that you are sharing the burden of its maintenance with a great many more people. Fixing it, maybe by adding extensions to support your needs, comes with opportunities to improve the protocol even beyond that immediate need. Every change is a chance to work off some of the accumulated cruft.

Major refreshes, like the TLS 1.3 reworking, cleared out a ton of cruft in the process. You get to benefit from the work that others do to improve that protocol too.

Do the Work

It is hard to be a responsible steward for the fabric of the Internet. We do it because it is worthwhile. Ignoring the lessons of the past is not helpful.

21 Jul 2026 12:00am GMT

17 Jul 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Mozilla Privacy Blog: Beyond technical fixes: Protecting kids online without breaking the internet

This is part one of a two-part series in which we explore approaches to protecting children online while safeguarding privacy, security and the open web. Part one covers our concerns regarding age gates, and alternative policy proposals that address the root causes of online harms.

Young people today have unprecedented opportunities to learn, connect, and explore - not just the web and the world, but also themselves. With the increased ubiquity of digital technologies and devices, worries around the relationship between these technologies and young people's well-being have grown, too. While concerns about the societal implications of new technologies is not a new phenomenon, experts argue that the accelerating speed of deployment of new technologies has outpaced scientists' capacity to feed into policy recommendations addressing risks. A growing body of research documents the harms experienced by young people online and the challenges reported by parents attempting to mediate their kids' technology use. At the same time, experts highlight the importance of contextual factors like existing mental health conditions, socio-economic circumstances and parental mediation to understand the real-world effects of digital technologies.

Faced with this complexity, and mounting public pressure, policymakers around the world are urgently seeking ways to improve child safety online. Driven by a sense of time running out and promises of new technical solutions to difficult questions, this has led, across jurisdictions, to proposals to restrict young people's access to certain technologies or platforms by introducing age assurance mandates.

Privacy and user empowerment have always formed a core part of Mozilla's mission. As we have said before, we support safer spaces for minors, but we caution against approaches that rely on identity checks, surveillance-based enforcement, or exclusionary defaults. Such interventions rely on the collection of personal and sensitive data and, thus, introduce major new privacy and security risks.

While many technologies exist to verify, estimate, or infer users' ages, fundamental tensions around accessibility, their effectiveness and effects on user's privacy, security and free expression remain. Technological approaches must be part of wider efforts to address the root causes of online harms. However, the deployment of age assurance technologies will not solve the complex challenge of preparing young people to navigate an increasingly online world and ensure their wellbeing. That will require more holistic approaches: offering education and support to navigate the web safely, addressing harmful business practices and acknowledging the offline factors shaping children's lives including social inequality, poverty or disparate access to (mental) health care services.

Ineffective age-gating mandates and the dangerous shift toward VPN restrictions

As jurisdictions around the world gain experience with government-mandated age gates for certain services, evidence is mounting that age restrictions are not an effective policy tool. Avoiding age gates is widespread and trivially easy: In Australia, where minors under 16 year of age have been banned from certain social media platforms since December 2025, the government's Compliance Update reports that seven out of ten young Australians remain online, often skirting age checks by simply entering a fake birthdate. A recent study on the implementation of the UK's Online Safety Act found that a third of children have bypassed age gates with fairly trivial steps like faking their birthdate, borrowing someone else's login credentials, or even drawing on facial hair, and that a quarter of parents have helped their children to bypass age assurance systems. In the US, studies indicate that as far back as 2011, 64% of parents who were aware their child under 13 had a social media account were also ones who helped them create that account.

Confronted with the apparent ineffectiveness of age gates, policymakers around the world seem to be shifting their attention to alleged circumvention tools. While research shows that many young people bypass age barriers by using other people's devices and accounts or tricking age estimation tools by making themselves look older, virtual private networks (VPNs) are increasingly framed as primarily a "loophole" to age gates. VPNs create encrypted "tunnels" between a user's device and the internet, protecting all internet traffic from that device and concealing users' IP addresses. VPNs are an essential privacy and security resource for millions of users worldwide, including young people.

Utah's recent age verification law holds websites hosting age-restricted content liable for verifying the age of anyone physically located in Utah, including individuals using VPNs or proxies. While the law does not ban VPNs outright, it forces websites to either block known VPN IP addresses or verify the age of every visitor globally. In the UK, policymakers debated age gates for VPNs extensively, but stopped short of restricting VPNs after new evidence confirmed that VPNs are not a relevant pathway for children seeking to bypass age checks. In Brazil, the ECA Digital law empowers the regulatory authority to order technical countermeasures against circumvention tools such as VPNs. These developments suggest a worrying trend: well-meaning but ineffective attempts to protect children risk undermining the fundamental rights to privacy, security, and free expression of all users, as well as the health and openness of the web itself.

We are convinced, however, that there are rights-respecting alternatives policymakers can pursue to empower young people online and improve their safety and well-being.

Moving beyond access bans

We strongly believe that online safety frameworks should be grounded in children's rights, striking a balance between their right to protection and their right to participate in society, express themselves freely, and access media and information. Such frameworks must also be proportionate and should not undermine the fundamental rights and access to tools like VPNs for all users.

Rather than focusing on limiting access, we believe that policymakers should prioritize interventions that tackle the root causes of online harm. Before considering new instruments, this work starts with ensuring that independent regulatory authorities have the necessary resources to enforce existing online safety frameworks. In Europe, preliminary findings against Meta and TikTok find these companies' addictive design features to be in breach of the Digital Services Act, underlining the potential of frameworks like the DSA to address key concerns.

The design of online interfaces, and the affordances and constraints they offer, significantly influences users' interactions, decisions and overall wellbeing. 'Dark patterns' or deceptive interfaces are key drivers of harms experienced by users, and especially young people: they can compel people to consent to extensive data collection and processing, resulting in hyper-personalized feeds, personalized ads that may exploit cognitive vulnerabilities and promote unhealthy or excessive consumer choices, and an overall erosion of privacy.

This is why we support proposals like EU Digital Fairness Act (DFA) and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) that could fill regulatory gaps. Specifically, we advocate for the prohibition of harmful design, guided by harmonized definitions of core concepts like "dark patterns", "deceptive design," and "addictive design" and anti-circumvention clauses to prevent companies from avoiding regulation through small tweaks. Platforms should be responsible for demonstrating that their design choices are fair, non-manipulative and non-exploitative. And services that are likely to be accessed by children should be required to refrain from enabling certain design features, including excessive notifications, endless feeds and gambling-like features by default, and only with parental consent.

Further, we urge policymakers to adopt a privacy-first approach to online harms. Many of the risks encountered by young people online are related to the collection and processing of personal data. Platforms collect enormous amounts of personal data, including sensitive data, to personalize and target services, ranging from algorithmic recommender systems to online ads. While the systems that target and display ads and curate online content are distinct, both are based on the surveillance and profiling of users.

Such profiling is the basis for young people being targeted with personalized ads and content recommendations, which can segment, exclude, or steer people into inequitable options and towards harmful content. Providers should thus be prohibited from using sensitive personal data (e.g. ethnicity, religious belief, health status, sexual orientation, political affiliation) to personalize content recommendations or ads, and they should be mandated to enable privacy-protective settings by default, including restricting access to users' location, camera, microphone, contacts, and camera roll. Policymakers should also extend the fairness and transparency obligations to personalization systems and advertising actors, including intermediaries and data brokers.

Additionally, everyone online, including families and young people, should be fully in control of their online experiences and navigate the web according to their preferences and needs. There is a significant opportunity to empower users with easy, effective opt-out rights and granular user controls. In practice, users should have the right to opt out of personalized content and targeting without being penalized with a downgraded version of the service. Some frameworks already strengthen choice - in those cases, we advocate for their robust enforcement.

Across jurisdictions, choice can be strengthened by ensuring that preferences explicitly expressed (e.g. settings selected, feedback signals, customization choices made, survey responses) are respected and "sticky", so do not get reset without being explicitly requested by the user. Interoperability mandates should let people integrate third-party content moderation systems or recommendation algorithms that better match their preferences and help them break out of the walled gardens of a few dominant companies. Parental controls are another important lever to operationalize user controls: Providers should deploy easy-to-use and effective parental controls that allow families to tailor online experiences to their preferences, across platforms.

We appreciate that this is a long list of complex policy recommendations which are also impacted by broader (geo)political developments. The fact remains that current age assurance approaches are not a silver bullet, and will create more, rather than solve, problems in the long term.

Where policymakers consider age signals as necessary to ensure age-appropriate online experiences, we believe that there are technical approaches better suited to balance users' rights than those currently pursued. We will explore these developments and approaches in the second part of this series.

The post Beyond technical fixes: Protecting kids online without breaking the internet appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

17 Jul 2026 9:05am GMT

16 Jul 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

The Rust Programming Language Blog: Announcing Rust 1.97.1

The Rust team has published a new point release of Rust, 1.97.1. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

If you have a previous version of Rust installed via rustup, getting Rust 1.97.1 is as easy as:

rustup update stable

If you don't have it already, you can get rustup from the appropriate page on our website.

What's in 1.97.1

Rust 1.97.1 fixes a miscompilation in an LLVM optimization.

We have backported both an LLVM fix and a disable of the underlying change in Rust 1.97.0 of Rust's generated IR that increased the likelihood of this happening. However, note that the underlying miscompilation has been present since at least Rust 1.87.

If you'd like to help us out by testing future releases, you might consider running your code's CI or locally using the beta channel (rustup default beta) or the nightly channel (rustup default nightly). Please report any bugs you might come across!

Contributors to 1.97.1

Many people came together to create Rust 1.97.1. We couldn't have done it without all of you. Thanks!

16 Jul 2026 12:00am GMT

15 Jul 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Niko Matsakis: Battery packs: Let's talk about crates, baby

Battery pack logo

This blog post describes an idea I've been kicking around called battery packs. Battery packs are a curated set of crates arranged around a common theme. For example, there's a CLI battery pack that has everything you need to build a great CLI, an opinionated pack for creating a backend web service, and one for embedded development (based on the Embedded Working Group's Awesome Rust repository). We've also got some smaller ones, such as the error-handling battery pack that shows how to handle errors in Rust. But this is just the beginning - a key part of the battery pack design is that anybody can create one.

Battery packs are meant to address one of the most common things I hear from new Rust adopters. Everyone loves the wealth of high-quality crates available on crates.io. And everyone hates having to spend a bunch of time researching and comparing alternatives. Battery packs can serve as a good set of default choices. And they don't lock you in. At heart, they're basically just a list of recommended crates, so you can always swap something out if you find an alternative.

We've got a prototype of the battery pack tool working today, so you can try it out if you're curious. Just run cargo install cargo-bp and then try a few commands! For example,

> cargo bp list

will show you the set of available battery packs, based on a crates.io search (as I'll explain below, a battery pack is itself packaged and distributed as a crate, but not one that you take a direct dependency on). And cargo bp add will add batteries from a battery pack into your crate, so e.g.

> cargo bp add cli

would let you select and add common CLI libraries. If you want to see a more involved demo, try out cargo bp add embedded, which is derived from the Awesome Embedded Rust repository.

Let's talk about you and me

One of the key ideas from battery packs is that anybody can publish one. They are just a crate named X-battery-pack; the dependencies of that crate are your recommendations. Features are designations of common sets of crates frequently used together. The examples are your templates. And so forth.

Letting anybody create a battery pack is in contrast to the previous ideas for an "extended standard library for Rust"1, and it is intended to address some of Rust's unique challenges. For one thing, it lets people publish battery packs that are tailored to specific requirements. For example, the CLI and backend service battery packs are targeting a "typical computer". But I could imagine the Rust embedded working group publishing a battery pack with libraries focused on no-std and binary size optimization.

Being open-ended also addresses the "who decides?" question. To my mind, the best people to recommend what libraries you ought to use are other people building systems like yours. This is why I mentioned the Embedded Working Group publishing an Embedded battery pack, for example, as I think they are clearly a set of people who know their space well. But even within the embedded space there are yet smaller groups, and I imagine that sometimes it'll make sense to get narrower. For example, perhaps a battery pack targeted embassy and its associated ecosystem? Unclear.

Creating a battery pack

If you wanted to create a battery pack, how do you do it? One answer is that you just create a new crate. But a better approach is to use the "battery-pack battery pack"2, which bundles a template:

cargo bp new battery-pack

This will prompt you for the name of the battery pack you want to create and a few other things and make your crate. Then you can just use cargo add dependencies to represent the libraries you want to recommend and publish.

"Batteries" are more than dependencies

The "batteries" that you can add to your project aren't always dependencies. They can also be "recipes" or templates. For example, the CI battery pack3 can configure your project with the kind of "super neat-o" github actions you've always wanted but never wanted to bother configuring. To use it, select one or more of the templates to install:

cargo bp add ci

I expect this kind of "actions to improve your crate" to become a rich source of things. Right now we're using a relatively lightweight template system built on minijinja, but I think we're going to want to expand on this.

Giving it some structure

Battery Packs also support more than just a flat listing of dependencies/features/templates. You can group dependencies and features into categories and then, for each category, distinguish between "pick at most one" or "pick any number". For a fun example, try cargo bp add embedded, which is derived from the Awesome Embedded Rust repository. If you run it, you'll see something like this, which groups the choices thematically and, in some areas like "concurrency framework", makes it clear that you want to pick one:

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 ▼ Concurrency Framework (pick at most one)
 > ○ ✦ embassy [embassy-executor, embassy-sync, embassy-time]
   ○ ✦ rtic [cortex-m, rtic]    RTIC - interrupt-driven real-time

 ▼ Display & Graphics (pick any number)
   [ ] ✦ display-ssd1306 [embedded-graphics, ssd1306]    SSD1306
   [ ] ✦ display-st7789 [embedded-graphics, st7789]    ST7789 col

 ▼ Popular Drivers (pick any number)
   [ ] ✦ display-ssd1306 [embedded-graphics, ssd1306]    SSD1306
   [ ] ✦ display-st7789 [embedded-graphics, st7789]    ST7789 col
   [ ] ✦ sensor-bme280 [bme280]    BME280 temperature/humidity/pr
   [ ] ✦ sensor-lis3dh [lis3dh]    LIS3DH 3-axis accelerometer (I
   [ ] ✦ usb-device [usb-device, usbd-serial]    USB device stack

 ▼ Hardware Abstraction Layer (pick at most one)
   ○ ✦ atsamd [atsamd-hal, cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, co
   ○ ✦ esp32 [embedded-hal, esp-hal]    ESP32 (Xtensa, WiFi + BT,
   ○ ✦ esp32c3 [embedded-hal, esp-hal]    ESP32-C3 (RISC-V, WiFi
   ○ ✦ esp32s3 [embedded-hal, esp-hal]    ESP32-S3 (Xtensa, WiFi
   ○ ✦ nrf52832 [cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, cortex-m, em
   ○ ✦ nrf52840 [cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, cortex-m, em
   ○ ✦ nrf9160 [cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, cortex-m, emb
   ○ ✦ rp2040 [cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, cortex-m, embe
   ○ ✦ stm32f0 [cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, cortex-m, emb
 embedded-battery-pack v0.1.0  ↑↓/jk Navigate | Space Toggle | ←/→

Let's talk about all the good things…

So why am I so keen on battery packs? It's largely because I've heard so many would-be or recent Rust adopters talk about picking crates as a challenge. But I feel they would help with some other problems as well.

What I really want to see is working groups in the Rust Commercial Network banding together to publish battery packs and recommendations. These would cover the dependencies that they're actually using.

Supporting maintainers

One of the reasons I want to have RCN-recognized battery packs is that they are a natural focal point to then prompt RCN members to fund the maintenance of those crates. I am imagining that for each sponsored battery pack vended within the RCN, there is an associated "ecosystem fund". Companies or individuals could sponsor this fund to get access to early patches, security disclosures, etc or other perks. The money would be used to support the maintainers of those crates, to implement missing features, and so forth.

Fostering interoperability

Another value-add from battery packs is the ability to drive interop efforts. I think that as soon as we start talking about standardizing, we're also going to recognize that there are some places where standardization is hard. For example, early conversations within the network service working group (unsurprisingly) immediately identified that while most people are using tokio, some major companies are using their own runtimes internally. It's not like the need for "async runtime interop" is news. But right now, every crate winds up effectively implementing their own set of little traits to make it work. Sponsored battery packs offer the possibility of a neutral home for that sort of thing.

…and the bad things that could be

There are some risks to people using battery packs. The most obvious is that the fact that anybody can publish a battery pack may mean that you just get a ton of battery packs, which doesn't really help anybody! I'm not so worried about this because I think that there will be a few obvious places that most people go first, and then I think once people are oriented, they'll get excited to explore what crates.io has to offer and start discovering more niche battery packs.

Avoiding stagnation

Battery packs are designed to evolve. I've seen it happen a number of times that there is a dominant crate for something, often taking a "traditional approach", but then somebody else comes along and presents an interesting alternative that gradually takes off. I love that and I don't want to put it at risk.

One example of evolution around CLI argument parsing. For a time, docopt was a popular way to parse command-line options. Then clap came along and presented a more structured alternative; that was nice, but then structopt came along and connected clap to an auto-derive, so you could just write your data structure and be done. And that was awesome. (That is now the standard in clap.) I want to be sure that, even if there is a CLI battery pack, there's room for the next clap to come along.

There are a few things about battery pack that I think will help us deal with this. First, they are a "thin abstraction". You don't "depend on" a battery pack, you depend on the crates within it. So if a new version comes out that uses clap instead of docopt, that doesn't impact you at all. Your code keeps working same as it ever did. And of course it helps that anybody can publish a battery pack. You can now have variations on battery packs that are focused around a new approach to help it get started.

Done right, I think that standardized battery packs can also help the ecosystem evolve and pivot. As it is now, knowledge of new crates has to spread by word-of-mouth. But if everybody is aligned around a new approach, adopting that new approach within a battery packs sends a clear signal that your group is aligned that something is the new hotness.

…Let's talk about crates4

"Always bet on the ecosystem"

I see always bet on the ecosystem as a key Rust design axiom. It's the reason we chose a small standard library and a package manager in the first place. It's also why battery packs are designed to be published by anyone.

But just like plants sometimes need a trellis to grow taller, any successful ecosystem reaches a point where it needs another layer of structure to help it keep growing. Without that, you have this "layer of tacic knowledge" (in the words of a Rust Vision Doc interviewee) that becomes an obstacle for folks. And I think we've reached that point with crates.io.

I am hopeful that battery packs can provide that next layer of structure. But at the end of the day, if there's a better approach, that's fine too, so long as we find a way to help people find (and fund!) the crates they need. So let's talk about it!

  1. My first recollection of it was the Rust Platform idea we floated in 2016! ↩︎

  2. Yo dawg… ↩︎

  3. Hat tip to Jess Izen, who proposed and developed the CI battery pack. Neat idea. ↩︎

  4. Oh, and: my apologies to Salt-N-Peppa. ↩︎

15 Jul 2026 3:24pm GMT

This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 660

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @thisweekinrust.bsky.social on Bluesky or @ThisWeekinRust on mastodon.social, or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub and archives can be viewed at this-week-in-rust.org. If you find any errors in this week's issue, please submit a PR.

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Updates from Rust Community

Official
Project/Tooling Updates
Observations/Thoughts
Rust Walkthroughs
Miscellaneous

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is dashu, a pure Rust set of libraries of arbitrary precision numbers.

Thanks to JacobZ for the self-suggestion!

Please submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Calls for Testing

An important step for RFC implementation is for people to experiment with the implementation and give feedback, especially before stabilization.

If you are a feature implementer and would like your RFC to appear in this list, add a call-for-testing label to your RFC along with a comment providing testing instructions and/or guidance on which aspect(s) of the feature need testing.

No calls for testing were issued this week by Rust, Cargo, Rustup or Rust language RFCs.

Let us know if you would like your feature to be tracked as a part of this list.

Call for Participation; projects and speakers

CFP - Projects

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but did not know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!

Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.

If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here or through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on Bluesky or Mastodon!

CFP - Events

Are you a new or experienced speaker looking for a place to share something cool? This section highlights events that are being planned and are accepting submissions to join their event as a speaker.

If you are an event organizer hoping to expand the reach of your event, please submit a link to the website through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on Bluesky or Mastodon!

Updates from the Rust Project

550 pull requests were merged in the last week

Compiler
Library
Cargo
Clippy
Rust-Analyzer
Rust Compiler Performance Triage

This week many new optimizations landed, making this a very good week for performance. The only real regression was a fix for a miscompile that will likely be re-landed in the future.

Triage done by @JonathanBrouwer. Revision range: 3659db0d..5503df87

Summary:

(instructions:u) mean range count
Regressions ❌
(primary)		 0.3% [0.2%, 0.4%] 3
Regressions ❌
(secondary)		 0.9% [0.1%, 2.5%] 25
Improvements ✅
(primary)		 -1.2% [-9.9%, -0.2%] 195
Improvements ✅
(secondary)		 -3.4% [-92.1%, -0.1%] 174
All ❌✅ (primary) -1.2% [-9.9%, 0.4%] 198

2 Regressions, 10 Improvements, 10 Mixed; 7 of them in rollups 36 artifact comparisons made in total

Full report here

Approved RFCs

Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:

Final Comment Period

Every week, the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now.

Tracking Issues & PRs

Rust

Compiler Team (MCPs only)

No Items entered Final Comment Period this week for Cargo, Language Reference, Language Team, Leadership Council, Rust RFCs or Unsafe Code Guidelines.

Let us know if you would like your PRs, Tracking Issues or RFCs to be tracked as a part of this list.

New and Updated RFCs

Upcoming Events

Rusty Events between 2026-07-15 - 2026-08-12 🦀

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If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Please remember to add a link to the event too. Email the Rust Community Team for access.

Jobs

Please see the latest Who's Hiring thread on r/rust

Quote of the Week

Thank you for your PR, but please edit the description like you are a chainsaw-wielding maniac that just discovered the sentences are young adults who came to the lake at summer camp after sunset.

- workingjubilee on Rust github

Thanks to Theemathas for the suggestion!

Please submit quotes and vote for next week!

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Discuss on r/rust

15 Jul 2026 4:00am GMT

14 Jul 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Thunderbird Blog: Community Office Hours: A Thundermail Update

Our Community Office Hours series is all about connecting with the people behind Thunderbird and our products, and sharing the work that's happening behind the scenes. These conversations are a chance to learn more about the direction of our projects and to hear directly from the people making it happen.

In this episode, we are talking about Thundermail!

Since we first shared our plans for Thundermail, we have seen an incredible amount of excitement, curiosity, and thoughtful feedback from the community of early bird testers. In this Community Office Hours session, members of the Thunderbird team sit down to talk about the project's vision, share where things stand today, and answer some of the questions we've been getting along the way.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

One of the best parts of Community Office Hours is the opportunity to have open conversations with our community. Your questions, ideas, and feedback help shape Thunderbird and its products, and we are excited to keep sharing updates as Thundermail continues to evolve.

Resources

Resources for Suggesting Features:

Thunderbird on Desktop and Mobile - https://connect.mozilla.org

Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro - https://ideas.tb.pro

Resources for diving into Thundermail:

Thundermail (and other services) roadmap: https://roadmaps.thunderbird.net/en-US/services/

Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThunderbirdPro/

Thunderbird Pro addon repo that is now shipped natively in Thunderbird: https://github.com/thunderbird/tbpro-add-on

Thunderbird Accounts repo: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-accounts

Webmail client repo: https://github.com/thunderbird/stormbox

Appointment repo: https://github.com/thunderbird/appointment

Thundermail deployment repo: https://github.com/thunderbird/thundermail-deploy

SieveConnect repo: https://github.com/philpennock/sieve-connect

Resources for Getting Help with Thunderbird:

Thunderbird for Android Support Channel (Matrix) - https://matrix.to/#/#tb-android:mozilla.org

Thunderbird Desktop Support Channel (Matrix) - https://matrix.to/#/#thunderbird:mozilla.org

The post Community Office Hours: A Thundermail Update appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

14 Jul 2026 7:36pm GMT

Firefox Tooling Announcements: Happy BMO Push Day! (20260713.1)

Github Link

The following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org:

Discuss these changes in the BMO Matrix Room

1 post - 1 participant

Read full topic

14 Jul 2026 6:44pm GMT

The Mozilla Blog: Over The Edge 2.0: what independent researchers found about browser choice on Windows

Two years ago Mozilla asked two leading experts on deceptive design, Dr. Harry Brignull and Cennydd Bowles, to look at how Microsoft was treating people who tried to use a different browser on Windows. Their report, Over The Edge, documented a pattern of design choices in Windows, Edge, and Bing that nudged, pressured, and at times tricked people into using Edge.

This morning, the same researchers are publishing Over The Edge 2.0. They retested the same questions across Windows 10 and Windows 11, and added two new dimensions. First, how does Microsoft's approach change from one jurisdiction to another? They assessed Microsoft's tactics across four regions: the USA, India, the UK, and Germany, as a representative country in the European Economic Area. Second, they examined how AI features, specifically Copilot, are being used to shape the same outcomes the original report identified.

Their conclusion is short. Microsoft still does not allow users to download, set as the default, or keep using alternative browsers without harmful interference. The patterns are documented, and they meet established definitions of coercion, deception, and manipulation.

There is one bright spot. In Europe, where the Digital Markets Act applies, some harmful design tactics are gone. The Bing 'All you need is right here' panel and its trick wording. The nagging Windows 10 'You're almost done setting up your PC' journey. The Copilot data toggles that default to "On" in the US and India, by contrast default to "Off" in the EEA and the UK. Same Windows. Same Edge. Same Copilot. Different design choices, because the law required them.

That is the heart of the report. Although the EEA product still has obvious harmful design patterns, Microsoft has built a fairer user experience for browser choice. It has shipped that experience to one region. Everywhere else, including the US, the UK, India, and Brazil, harmful design patterns continue. This is an active choice - and one that can be made differently.

The findings are the researchers' own. Mozilla commissioned the work, and the report discloses that role, but the methodology, the screenshots, and the public journey database at edge.brignull.com let anyone check the evidence for themselves.

We make Firefox because we believe the web should serve people, not platforms. Firefox is independent, built by Mozilla, and designed around what is best for users, not what increases lock-in.

Read the full report here.

The post Over The Edge 2.0: what independent researchers found about browser choice on Windows appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

14 Jul 2026 12:30pm GMT