15 Apr 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Mozilla Localization (L10N): Localizer Spotlight: Baurzhan

About you

My name is Baurzhan Muftakhidinov. I'm from Kazakhstan. I speak Kazakh, Russian, English and I have been contributing to Mozilla localization for more than 18 years.

From Linux Curiosity to Mozilla Localization

Q: How did you get involved in localization, and what drew you to Mozilla?

A: I came to Mozilla through Linux during my student years. I became interested in Linux at university, and very quickly I noticed how closely the open source world was connected: where there was Linux, Firefox was usually nearby.

When installing Linux distributions, one of the first things I noticed was language support. Many languages were available, but Kazakh was often missing or only partially supported. That made me ask a simple question: why is that, and what can be done about it?

Through Ubuntu's CD distribution program, I discovered Launchpad and began translating Firefox there. Around the same time, through a local Linux forum, I connected with Timur Timirkhanov, who already had experience with Mozilla localization. He helped me understand Mozilla's processes, pointed me to packages that needed translation, and opened a locale registration ticket for Kazakh in Bugzilla.

Soon after, Dauren Sarsenov joined, and in the beginning it was mainly the two of us working on Firefox. When Kazakh first appeared in a Firefox beta in spring 2009, we were extremely proud. It felt like a real milestone - not just translating isolated strings, but seeing a major global product appear in Kazakh.

For me, that was bigger than one browser. At the time, we were dreaming about a fully usable open source desktop in Kazakh, and Mozilla localization became one important part of that larger goal. What started as curiosity became a long-term commitment: making technology more accessible in Kazakh and proving that our language belongs in modern software.

Q: Which Mozilla products are closest to you? Do you use them regularly?

A: Firefox is definitely the product closest to me because I use it every day - both desktop and mobile. It never feels like I am translating something distant from my real life. I see the interface, the wording choices, and the practical impact of localization almost daily.

What makes Firefox especially meaningful is that it is both symbolic and practical. Symbolically, it showed that Kazakh could be present in one of the most important pieces of everyday software. Practically, it gave users a browser they could use in their own language. A browser is the gateway to the internet, so localizing Firefox means much more than translating one application.

I also use Thunderbird from time to time and visit MDN quite often. Even when I am not translating, I interact with Mozilla products as a user, so there is always a natural connection between volunteer work and daily habits.

People around me know me through Firefox localization more than through anything else. Very often I am simply "the person who translated Firefox into Kazakh." That says a lot about how visible Firefox has been.

Promoting Kazakh Localization and Building an Ecosystem

Q: How have you promoted Kazakh-localized software?

A: Most of my promotion work has been grassroots. In earlier years, I shared updates on Linux and open source forums, especially communities already interested in free software. Even when people were not personally interested in contributing, many showed strong support and encouragement. That confirmed that localization mattered beyond just the translation team.

One of my bigger efforts was creating a Debian-based Linux distribution from 2012 to 2015 called Kazsid. I built it partly to test how Kazakh localization worked across multiple applications in a real desktop environment. I included programs that already had Kazakh translations - Firefox, LibreOffice, desktop environments, and other tools - set Kazakh as the default language, and tested how everything worked together.

I shared the builds on forums, and some people downloaded and tried them. It was one of the most practical ways I encouraged interest in Linux and localized software.

Later, as translations matured upstream, maintaining a separate distribution was no longer necessary. That was actually a positive sign - users could install standard distributions and get the same localized experience.

Today I post updates on LinkedIn. It helps maintain visibility, even if it does not often bring in new contributors.

Working Independently - and Working Systematically

Q: What does the Kazakh localization community look like today?

A: At the moment, I am effectively the only active contributor across several major open source localization efforts in Kazakh, including Mozilla products, LibreOffice, GNOME, Xfce, and others.

In the early years, several people made meaningful contributions, but most eventually moved on. Timur helped significantly, especially in the earlier stages and in understanding Mozilla's processes, and I still occasionally consult trusted people when I need a second opinion.

The challenge for smaller languages is not only starting a translation but maintaining it over the long term. From early on, I was not thinking about one application. My goal was broader: to help create a real open source desktop experience in Kazakh. A browser translated into Kazakh is important, but a full ecosystem is even more meaningful. Sustainability is the hardest part.

Q: How do you approach quality when you are the main translator?

A: Direct user feedback is rare. So QA depends largely on my own testing, judgment, and systems.

I test software in real use, especially Firefox. In earlier years, I also used Nightly builds. Before settling on new terminology, I check dictionaries and reference materials. I consult fluent speakers when needed, and sometimes I discuss wording with my wife to see how natural it sounds.

My principle is that translations should feel clear and alive, not mechanically imported. I studied in Kazakh and remember the terms we were actually taught in IT-related subjects, and that background matters to me.

Because of my scripting background, I have written small tools in Python to help verify translations, track terminology, and maintain consistency. QA is not just "reading it once and hoping for the best." It is a combination of linguistic judgment, real usage, consultation, and automated checking.

More recently, I have been exploring how AI can assist localization. By testing translations through tools like the Google Gemini API and guiding terminology carefully, I have been able to close significant translation gaps. For Kazakh, newer models understand context much better than traditional machine translation systems. AI does not replace judgment, but it can make the work faster and more effective.

Professional Background

Q: How does your professional background influence your localization work?

Baurzhan at GIS Day 2025

A: My background is partly technical and partly analytical. I studied IT, worked as a Linux system administrator, and later moved into data analysis and GIS.

Those technical skills helped significantly. Automation makes a long-term localization effort much more manageable, especially when one person is doing most of the work.

Localization has strengthened my discipline and consistency. It requires patience and regular effort. Over time, I developed an instinct for terminology and phrasing - whether a term feels natural or artificial in context.

A Few Personal Notes

I have loved reading since I was four years old. My favorite genres are science fiction and popular science. Reading is still how I recharge.

I have lived in several cities in Kazakhstan, so I sometimes joke that I am a true nomad.

My family has always been supportive of my open source work. And when I run into a particularly difficult translation, I can still discuss it with my wife and get a fresh perspective.

15 Apr 2026 10:38pm GMT

Firefox Tooling Announcements: Happy BMO Push Day! (20260415.1)

Github Link

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

Discuss these changes in the BMO Matrix Room

1 post - 1 participant

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15 Apr 2026 9:29pm GMT

Firefox Nightly: QR Codes, Speed Calculators, Better RAM Usage – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 199

Highlights

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework
WebExtension APIs
Addon Manager & about:addons

DevTools

WebDriver

Lint, Docs and Workflow

New Tab Page

Search

Smart Window

Storybook/Reusable Components/Acorn Design System

UX Fundamentals

15 Apr 2026 8:44pm GMT

Mozilla Privacy Blog: Mozilla Urges the FTC to Tackle Harmful Design Practices

In response to concerns from both consumers and the industry, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) invited public comment on whether it should amend the current Rule Concerning the Use of Prenotification Negative Option Plans to address deceptive or unfair negative option practices.

Negative option marketing is a practice in which a seller treats a consumer's silence or failure to take action as consent to be charged for goods or services. This technique is often used in subscription services, where users may be guided toward accepting recurring charges through default selections or obscure disclosures. These design practices, also known as "dark patterns," successfully manipulate and influence user behavior on a systematic level and are often employed in all aspects of digital markets, not just with subscriptions.

As a browser developer, Mozilla is well-acquainted with the negative impacts of manipulative design. The web browser market provides a documented case study illustrating how operating systems deploy deceptive design practices to weaponize friction and status-quo bias to influence consumer behavior. As such, Mozilla was eager to provide feedback and encourage the Commission to examine the breadth of deceptive design practices that undermine choice.

Dark patterns are a byproduct of power asymmetry between companies and consumers. If we don't protect meaningful choice and effective competition now, we risk giving even more control to the biggest players - and losing what makes the web open and innovative in the first place.

The FTC has a critical opportunity, both in this rulemaking and more broadly, to modernize consumer protection for the realities of digital markets. We encourage the FTC to:

We welcome the opportunity to share our relevant experiences in the browser space and look forward to continuing the conversation.

Read our full comments to the FTC for more details on our recommendations.

The post Mozilla Urges the FTC to Tackle Harmful Design Practices appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

15 Apr 2026 4:29pm GMT

Firefox Tooling Announcements: MozPhab 2.13.0 Released

Bugs resolved in Moz-Phab 2.13.0:

Discuss these changes in #engineering-workflow on Slack or #Conduit Matrix.

1 post - 1 participant

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15 Apr 2026 3:30pm GMT

This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 647

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
Project/Tooling Updates
Observations/Thoughts
Rust Walkthroughs

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is Myth Engine, a high-performance, cross-platform rendering engine.

Thanks to Pan Xinmiao 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.

No Calls for participation were submitted this week.

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

519 pull requests were merged in the last week

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

This week was negative, mainly caused by a type system fix and because we had to temporarily revert some attribute cleanups that previously improved performance.

Triage done by @panstromek. Revision range: e73c56ab..dab8d9d1

Summary:

(instructions:u) mean range count
Regressions ❌
(primary)		 0.4% [0.2%, 0.7%] 46
Regressions ❌
(secondary)		 0.5% [0.1%, 2.3%] 102
Improvements ✅
(primary)		 -0.5% [-0.6%, -0.4%] 4
Improvements ✅
(secondary)		 -0.4% [-0.6%, -0.2%] 5
All ❌✅ (primary) 0.4% [-0.6%, 0.7%] 50

4 Regressions, 1 Improvement, 5 Mixed; 6 of them in rollups 41 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

Cargo

Compiler Team (MCPs only)

Rust RFCs

Leadership Council

No Items entered Final Comment Period this week for Language Reference, Language Team 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 2026-04-15 - 2026-05-13 🦀

Virtual
Asia
Europe
North America
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

the amount of times that I spend 15 min in the docs + coding which end up in a monstrous or().flatten().map().is_ok_and() only to get slapped by clippy saying replace your monster with this single function please is way too high 😀

- Teufelchen on RIOT off-topic matrix chat

Thanks to chrysn for the suggestion!

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

15 Apr 2026 4:00am GMT

14 Apr 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Firefox Application Security Team: Firefox Security & Privacy Newsletter 2026 Q1

Welcome to the Q1 2026 edition of the Firefox Security & Privacy Newsletter.

Security and privacy are foundational to Mozilla's manifesto and central to how we build Firefox. In this edition, we highlight key security and privacy work from Q1 2026, organized into the following areas:

Preface

Note: Some of the bugs linked below might not be accessible to the general public and restricted to specific work groups. We de-restrict fixed security bugs after a grace-period, until the majority of our user population have received Firefox updates. If a link does not work for you, please accept this as a precaution for the safety of all Firefox users.

Firefox Product Security & Privacy

Collaboration with Anthropic: A few weeks ago, Anthropic's Frontier Red Team shared the results of a new AI-assisted vulnerability detection approach. Using this method, we have identified more than a dozen confirmed security issues, each supported by reproducible test cases. Learn more in our blog: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team. Leveraging our Firefox Security expertise, we ended up finding dozens of additional vulnerabilities that were fixed in the following Firefox updates.

YouTube coverage of Firefox at pwn2own 2025: To demonstrate Firefox's focus on user security and Mozilla's commitment to openness, we invited LiveOverflow to follow us during the prestigious hacking competition pwn2own last year. LiveOverflow's four-party documentary provides behind-the-scenes coverage of our quick response to fixing two Firefox 0-day security bugs. The videos go from preparation (part 1), to exploit analysis (part 2) and disclosure (part 3), all the way to the rapid release of a Firefox update (part 4) for the 2-day event coverage.

Trustworthy JavaScript for the Open Web: Alongside partners from Meta, Proton AG, Cloudflare, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, we presented our plans to improve the trustworthiness of JavaScript on the Web at Real World Crypto.

SafeBrowsing: Firefox 147 shipped with SafeBrowsing v5 support, allowing to protect users against malicious URLs. And starting with v149, Firefox blocks and revokes websites permissions for sites on the SafeBrowsing lists (Bug 1986300), leveling-up the built-in protection from online threats.

Stronger XSS Protection through the Sanitizer API: Starting with v148, Firefox was the first browser to add support for the Sanitizer API, helping prevent XSS attacks on the web. Learn more in our blog post, Goodbye innerHTML, Hello setHTML: Stronger XSS Protection in Firefox 148, or tune in to the ShopTalk Show podcast, where Freddy Braun discusses the details of the Sanitizer API.

2048-bit Minimum for RSA Certificates: Firefox now enforces a minimum 2048-bit RSA key size for certificates issued by Mozilla's built-in root CAs. As publicly trusted CAs already meet this requirement, no significant impact to the broader web is expected.

Community Engagement

Bug Bounty Program Updates: As the threat landscape evolves, addressing the increasing volume of AI-assisted security bug reports, we're evolving our security program alongside it. With continued advances in browser security architecture, our bug bounty program is refining its incentives to prioritize the highest-impact research and the most critical classes of vulnerabilities while focusing on novelty. Learn more in our blogpost: Bug Bounty Program Updates 2026. We have also just updated our Bug Bounty hall of fame, to list all people who helped us find and fix security vulnerabilities in Q1 of 2026.

Web Security & Standards

Storage-Access Headers: Firefox 147 is shipping an extension of the Storage Access API to improve both web compatibility and parity with Chrome. These Storage Access headers allow web pages to opt out of storage isolation upfront and without the need to first load a document.

Going Forward

As a Firefox user, you automatically benefit from the security and privacy improvements described above through Firefox's regular automatic updates. If you're not using Firefox yet, you can download it to enjoy a fast, secure browsing experience-while supporting Mozilla's mission of a healthy, safe, and accessible web for everyone.

We'd like to thank everyone who helps make Firefox and the open web more secure and privacy-respecting.

See you next time with the Q2 2026 report.

- The Firefox Security and Privacy Teams

14 Apr 2026 11:00pm GMT

13 Apr 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Mozilla Data YouTube Channel: Responsible Data Collection is Good, Actually (Ubisoft Data Summit 2021)

Firefox Telemetry Engineer and Data Steward Chris H-C (:chutten) gives a talk at Ubisoft's Data Summit 2021 about how Responsible Data Collection as practised at Mozilla makes cataloguing easy, stops instrumentation mistakes before they ship, and allows you to build self-serve analysis tooling that gets everyone invested in data quality. Oh, and it's cheaper, too.

13 Apr 2026 5:07pm GMT

Spidermonkey Development Blog: Benchmark Mode in SpiderMonkey

You ever get to the end of running benchmarks, maybe a long running one, and realize… "Oh no. I forgot to set that important option, and these results are useless"

Yeah. I have. Too many times.

So I've added --benchmark-mode and --strict-benchmark-mode to SpiderMonkey.

These options configure the shell for benchmarking, taking the wisdom of the team and boiling multiple shell options down to a single --benchmark-mode flag, and in --strict-benchmark-mode will abort the run if the shell is configured in a way where effective benchmarking is unlikely to be possible (e.g. benchmarking a debug build!)

The nice thing about nailing this down is that this is something we can point anyone to and know that their shell is following the rules any of us would follow.

The general design philosophy of benchmark mode is to disable things you wouldn't see enabled in Firefox in normal configuration, as well as debugging code that maybe makes sense for test suites but doesn't make sense for a benchmark.

Hopefully this is the end of me realizing that I forgot to pass --no-async-stacks yet again.

13 Apr 2026 5:00pm GMT

Mozilla Privacy Blog: Anti-hacking laws should not be used to lock up the open internet

Mozilla has joined EFF, the Alliance for Responsible Data Collection, Digital Medusa, and EleutherAI in filing an amicus brief in Amazon v. Perplexity, urging the Ninth Circuit not to stretch the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) far beyond its intended purpose.

We have said this before, and it remains true: laws designed to protect the security of the internet should not be used to undermine how people want to use it.

Our mission is grounded in the idea that the internet must remain open and accessible to all, and that privacy and security online are fundamental. Mozilla joined this brief because overly broad interpretations of computer crime laws can put those values at risk.

The CFAA is an anti-hacking law. It was meant to address break-ins to computer systems - not to criminalize tools that enable people to access and engage with information that is publicly available on the web. While there are no-doubt many challenging legal and policy questions around the growth and use of agentic AI tools, we believe expanding the reach of CFAA to address these issues would threaten innovation, chill the development of useful tools and services for researchers and journalists, and undermine competition online.

The post Anti-hacking laws should not be used to lock up the open internet appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

13 Apr 2026 4:51pm GMT

The Servo Blog: Servo is now available on crates.io

Today the Servo team has released v0.1.0 of the servo crate. This is our first crates.io release of the servo crate that allows Servo to be used as a library.

We currently do not have any plans of publishing our demo browser servoshell to crates.io. In the 5 releases since our initial GitHub release in October 2025, our release process has matured, with the main "bottleneck" now being the human-written monthly blog post. Since we're quite excited about this release, we decided to not wait for the monthly blog post to be finished, but promise to deliver the monthly update in the coming weeks.

As you can see from the version number, this release is not a 1.0 release. In fact, we still haven't finished discussing what 1.0 means for Servo. Nevertheless, the increased version number reflects our growing confidence in Servo's embedding API and its ability to meet some users' needs.

In the meantime we also decided to offer a long-term support (LTS) version of Servo, since breaking changes in the regular monthly releases are expected and some embedders might prefer doing major upgrades on a scheduled half-yearly basis while still receiving security updates and (hopefully!) some migration guides. For more details on the LTS release, see the respective section in the Servo book.

13 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

10 Apr 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Andreas Farre: How to make Firefox builds1 17% faster2

In the previous post, I mentioned that buildcache has some unique properties compared to ccache and sccache. One of them is its Lua plugin system, which lets you write custom wrappers for programs that aren't compilers in the traditional sense. With Bug 2027655 now merged, we can use this to cache Firefox's WebIDL binding code generation.

What's the WebIDL step?

When you build Firefox, one of the earlier steps runs python3 -m mozbuild.action.webidl to generate C++ binding code from hundreds of .webidl files. It produces thousands of output files: headers, cpp files, forward declarations, event implementations, and so on. The step isn't terribly slow on its own, but it runs on every clobber build, and the output is entirely deterministic given the same inputs. That makes it a perfect candidate for caching.

The problem was that the compiler cache was never passed to this step. Buildcache was only wrapping actual compiler invocations, not the Python codegen.

The change

The fix in Bug 2027655 is small. In dom/bindings/Makefile.in, we now conditionally pass $(CCACHE) as a command wrapper to the py_action call:

WEBIDL_CCACHE=
ifdef MOZ_USING_BUILDCACHE
WEBIDL_CCACHE=$(CCACHE)
endif

webidl.stub: $(codegen_dependencies)
        $(call py_action,webidl $(relativesrcdir),$(srcdir),,$(WEBIDL_CCACHE))
        @$(TOUCH) $@

The py_action macro in config/makefiles/functions.mk is what runs Python build actions. The ability to pass a command wrapper as a fourth argument was also introduced in this bug. When buildcache is configured as the compiler cache, this means the webidl action is invoked as buildcache python3 -m mozbuild.action.webidl ... instead of just python3 -m mozbuild.action.webidl .... That's all buildcache needs to intercept it.

Note the ifdef MOZ_USING_BUILDCACHE guard. This is specific to buildcache because ccache and sccache don't have a mechanism for caching arbitrary commands. Buildcache does, through its Lua wrappers.

The Lua wrapper

Buildcache's Lua plugin system lets you write a script that tells it how to handle a program it doesn't natively understand. The wrapper for WebIDL codegen, webidl.lua, needs to answer a few questions for buildcache:

With that information, buildcache can hash the inputs, check the cache, and either replay the cached outputs or run the real command and store the results.

The wrapper uses buildcache's direct_mode capability, meaning it hashes input files directly rather than relying on preprocessed output. This is the right approach here since we're not dealing with a C preprocessor but with a Python script that reads .webidl files.

Numbers

Here are build times for ./mach build on Linux, comparing compiler cachers. Each row shows a clobber build with an empty cache (cold), followed by a clobber build with a filled cache (warm):

tool cold warm with plugin
none 5m35s n/a n/a
ccache 5m42s 3m21s n/a
sccache 9m38s 2m49s n/a
buildcache 5m43s 1m27s 1m12s

The "with plugin" column is buildcache with the webidl.lua wrapper active. It shaves another 15 seconds1, bringing the total down to 1m12s2. Not a revolutionary improvement on its own, but it demonstrates the mechanism. The WebIDL step is just the first Python action to get this treatment; there are other codegen steps in the build that could benefit from the same approach.

More broadly, these numbers show buildcache pulling well ahead on warm builds. Going from a 5m35s clean build to a 1m12s cached rebuild is a nice improvement to the edit-compile-test cycle.

These are single runs on one machine, not rigorous benchmarks, but the direction is clear enough.

Setting it up

If you're already using buildcache with mach, the Makefile change is available when updating to today's central. To enable the Lua wrapper, clone the buildcache-wrappers repo and point buildcache at it via lua_paths in ~/.buildcache/config.json:

{
"lua_paths": ["/path/to/buildcache-wrappers/mozilla"],
"max_cache_size": 10737418240,
"max_local_entry_size": 2684354560
}

Alternatively, you can set the BUILDCACHE_LUA_PATH environment variable. A convenient place to do that is in your mozconfig:

mk_add_options "export BUILDCACHE_LUA_PATH=/path/to/buildcache-wrappers/mozilla/"

The large max_local_entry_size (2.5 GB) is needed because some Rust crates produce very large cache entries.

What's next

The Lua plugin system is the interesting part here. The WebIDL wrapper is a proof of concept, but the same technique applies to any deterministic build step that takes known inputs and produces known outputs. There are other codegen actions in the Firefox build that could get the same treatment, and I plan to explore those next.

Notes

  1. For a clobber build with a warm cache ↩

  2. On my machine ↩

10 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

09 Apr 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

The Mozilla Blog: Old habits die hard: Microsoft tries to limit our options, this time with AI

Black-and-white close-up of a hand using a device beside oversized cursor icons.

Microsoft recently announced it's pulling back Copilot from several of its core Windows apps - Photos, Notepad, the Snipping Tool, and Widgets. Rolling back these forced AI integrations is the right move, but this is just the most recent example of Microsoft going too far without user consent.

Copilot was pushed onto users

Over the past year, Copilot wasn't offered to Windows users - it was installed on them. The M365 Copilot app began auto-installing on any Windows device running Microsoft 365 desktop apps, with no prompt and no consent. A new physical keyboard key was added to laptops that launched Copilot by default, with no simple way to remap it. By default, Copilot was pinned to the taskbar starting with Windows 11 PCs. And, going a step further, Microsoft planned to embed it into three of the most fundamental surfaces for the operating system: the Windows notification center, the Settings app, and File Explorer.

Then came the user backlash.

When Microsoft says it now wants to be "intentional" about Copilot, they're really admitting that they made repeated choices to serve their business over their customers.

This isn't the first time - Microsoft has a pattern of deceptive design patterns

The pattern of behavior here isn't new. Independent research commissioned by Mozilla has documented how Microsoft uses design and distribution tactics to override user choice - from deliberately complicated processes for changing your default browser, to UI that routes users back to Microsoft's Edge browser even after they've explicitly chosen something else.

Since Mozilla published that research, Microsoft has continued to escalate its use of dark patterns to force behaviors that help the bottom line, not people's lives. Here are a few examples from the rollout of Windows 11 that have continued to strip users of their choice:

The Copilot rollout followed the same playbook we've come to expect from Microsoft: use automatic installs, physical hardware, and default settings to force behaviors. In the most recent instance, they allowed their AI to learn and gather data as quickly as possible before people had a choice.

What 'genuinely useful' AI integration actually looks like

We, like Microsoft and basically every tech company, have been asking ourselves the same question: What does it mean for AI to be genuinely useful? For us, the answer is simple. AI should work on your terms, not ours. Firefox's goal is to create AI enhancements that are made for people, not just because they can increase profit.

We've rolled out AI-enhanced features that make browsing smarter, faster, and more personalized, such as translations that stay local on your device to help you browse the web in your preferred language, alt text in PDFs to add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages and tab grouping which suggests related tabs and group names.

But we also know users deserve a choice. We built our answer into Firefox 148, introducing a centralized AI Controls panel in your browser settings including a single "Block AI Enhancements" switch that turns off every AI feature at once. Each option is also individually controllable.

The premise is simple: You should decide whether AI is part of your browsing experience at all. Not Big Tech. Not Mozilla. You.

And critically, your preferences also persist across browser updates, which means AI tools won't silently re-enable themselves after a major upgrade. No reinstalling. No opting out again after the fact. It's designed for people who care about what's happening on their computer but shouldn't have to become a systems administrator to stay in control of it.

The stakes are bigger than one rollback

When a company with Microsoft's reach continues to control users - and only walks it back when the noise gets loud enough - it shapes what people expect from technology. It tells people that their only real move is to complain until, hopefully, the company relents. It also makes it harder for alternatives to compete when a company uses its reach and control to steer people back into its own products.

We don't think that's the internet we have to accept. People have been clear about what they want when it comes to this era of the internet. They want to feel like they're in control of their own devices and their own data. That's the internet we're trying to build.

The post Old habits die hard: Microsoft tries to limit our options, this time with AI appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

09 Apr 2026 5:03pm GMT

The Mozilla Blog: 0DIN is open-sourcing AI security and the hard-earned knowledge behind it

Retro-futuristic scientist using an open-source AI scanner to analyze floating vintage technology and digital data streams in space.
Image generated by Nano Banana 2 in response to a request for a "Retro-futuristic collage of a scientist using an open-source AI scanner to analyze floating vintage tech and digital data streams."

We're launching across the developer and security community this week on Product Hunt and Hacker News. If you've been following AI security, we'd love your support and your feedback.

At Mozilla, open source has never been just a licensing choice. It's a conviction: the internet gets healthier when tools and knowledge circulate freely, when anyone can audit what's running, extend what exists, and build on what came before. That's why we built Firefox in the open. It's why we've kept building that way ever since.

0DIN, Mozilla's AI security team, is working from the same premise. This week we're releasing the 0DIN AI Security Scanner as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license, along with 179 community probes covering 35 vulnerability families, plus six specialty probes drawn exclusively from our bug bounty library.

The scanner, and the intelligence behind it

The 0DIN Scanner isn't another benchmark suite built from textbook examples. We're seeding it with probes drawn directly from our bug bounty program, where security researchers compete to find novel techniques to manipulate, extract data from, and subvert AI systems. As new vulnerabilities are discovered and disclosed through that program, we'll continue adding probes to the open-source library over time.

That loop, from researcher discovery to packaged reusable test, is what separates 0DIN Scanner from generic tooling. It's high impact intelligence on jailbreaks, updated frequently as our researchers find new techniques.

Built on NVIDIA's GARAK open-source framework, the 0DIN Scanner adds a graphical interface, automated scan scheduling, cross-model comparative analysis, and enterprise-grade reporting. It runs against frontier models, open source LLMs, chatbots and anything with a prompt interface. Security teams can see attack success rates, a vulnerability breakdown, and a comparison against the frontier models that attackers are also probing every day.

Six of those bug bounty probes are named here for the first time: Placeholder Injection, Incremental Table Completion, Technical Field Guide, Chemical Compiler Debug, Correction, and Hex Recipe Book. Each represents a real technique that worked against production AI systems before we closed the loop.

These probes are scored using JEF (Jailbreak Evaluation Framework), our open-source library for measuring prohibited content output, which is also seeing major updates this week.

The code is at github.com/0din-ai/ai-scanner. Fork it, extend it, build on it.

Knowing your risk before attackers do

Not every organization has a red team or the bandwidth to run adversarial testing. Many companies are deploying AI in production right now without a clear picture of where they're exposed. To help close that gap, we're offering free security assessments for enterprise AI deployments.

The assessment delivers an attack success rate against your systems, a breakdown across prompt injection, jailbreaks, and data extraction categories, and a benchmark comparison against major frontier models. The process takes a few minutes to setup with scan duration varying based on the number of probes chosen. If you're actively deploying AI and haven't tested it under adversarial conditions, this is a good place to start.

For teams that don't want to manage the open source scanner on their own, we also offer a managed Enterprise edition with access to nearly 500 pre-disclosure probes from the bug bounty program, giving organizations advance notice of emerging techniques before they're publicly known.

Why open source, and why now

AI is moving fast enough that no single team will solve this alone. There are too many threats, too many models, too much attack surface. Keeping our tools locked away would make 0DIN marginally stronger while leaving the broader internet weaker.

The researchers who submitted findings through our bug bounty program earned bounties for their work. We're releasing a meaningful portion of that intelligence as open source and we'll keep doing so as new vulnerabilities are discovered and disclosed. That's the deal Mozilla has always offered: we build in the open, the community helps make it better, and the web gets a little healthier for it.

Get involved

The post 0DIN is open-sourcing AI security and the hard-earned knowledge behind it appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

09 Apr 2026 4:35pm GMT

Andreas Farre: BuildCache now works with mach

I'm happy to announce that buildcache is now a first-class compiler cache in mach. This has been a long time coming, and I'm excited to finally see it land.

For those unfamiliar, buildcache is a compiler cache that can drastically cut down your rebuild times by caching compilation results. It's similar to ccache, but even more so sccache, in that it supports C/C++ out of the box, as well as Rust. It has some nice unique properties of its own though, which we'll look at more closely in following posts.

Getting started

Setting it up is straightforward. Just add the following to your mozconfig:

ac_add_options --with-ccache=buildcache

Then build as usual:

./mach build

That's it.

Give it a try

If you run into any issues, please file a bug and tag me. I'd love to hear how it works out for people, and any rough edges you might hit.

09 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

08 Apr 2026

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Firefox Tooling Announcements: MozPhab 2.12.0 Released

Bugs resolved in Moz-Phab 2.12.0:

Discuss these changes in #engineering-workflow on Slack or #Conduit Matrix.

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08 Apr 2026 6:04pm GMT