The AI race is shifting. Again. Practically overnight, competition has expanded from "which AI model is best?" to a new high-stakes battle over which models people can access, through which products, and whether people have meaningful choice about AI at all.
In response, Mozilla and Mistral today announced a partnership built on a shared idea: a new, open-source AI model alternative to Big Tech-default browser ecosystems. The intent: a model deliberately designed to keep the web open to technological diversity, competition, and choice.
And we're putting this idea into practice in Firefox.
Mistral Small 4 is coming to Firefox Smart Window beta (learn more about Firefox Smart Window here), becoming a new AI model for Smart Window users in the US and Canada, while expanding Smart Window beta access and French-language support to Firefox users in France. Across all markets where Smart Window beta is available, Firefox users can still choose from a multitude of other AI models.
"AI is becoming part of how people experience the web every day. We want to make sure that doesn't mean people are chained to one company's self-serving pipeline. With the browser sitting at the heart of the web and online experience, it should be a place where different AI providers can compete and open source has a seat at the table.
This isn't just a product partnership. A browser shouldn't be a one-way funnel. It should preserve what made the internet powerful to begin with: the freedom to explore, discover different ideas and tech, and decide for ourselves where to go next," said Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
Choice and competition are worth protecting
As AI integration becomes increasingly concentrated, we are in jeopardy of a handful of closed-model companies controlling the browser, the search engine, the AI model, and the surrounding services that connect them. Mozilla and Mistral are betting that independent and interoperable models can offer an alternative to global tech monopolies controlling the next digital era.
"This partnership represents two open source advocates working together to bring Mistral's scientific innovations to Mozilla's consumers around the world. Together, we are bringing privacy, control, and choice to AI-powered web browsing," said Arthur Mensch, Co-founder and CEO of Mistral.
Meaningful choice isn't confined to personal preference for one AI model over another. Web products need to be able to work with different AI providers, and people deserve the option of switching without being locked into a single company's ecosystem. When a tech layer as far-reaching and influential as AI is controlled by a small handful of players, it risks creating closed systems and closed doors, making it harder for new ideas and better technologies to grow, reach users, and compete on merits.
Mozilla and Mistral aim to keep that door open. The combination of an independent browser with a frontier European AI company gives people and institutions greater access to useful, responsible AI, the opposite of locking them into one company's singular technology ecosystem.
Selecting Mistral, and expanding to France
Mozilla selected Mistral Small 4 after evaluating its performance for Smart Window Beta, including multilingual performance, an important part of the fit. The companies approached multilingual and multicultural tuning as a core model feature, rather than simply adapting an English-first experience for a new market.
For Firefox users, Mistral access starts with Smart Window Beta, a browsing experience designed to turn AI into a useful assistant for the things we do online: making sense of complex search trails, finding something valuable you clicked away from, presenting data sources, and generally picking up where day-to-day internet use got left off.
France is the first new market for Smart Window with official French-language support. Mozilla is planning additional European expansion later this year.
A different kind of AI competition
Our Mistral partnership puts an ambitious new AI model approach into practice: a multilingual, globally competitive European AI company reaching people through an independent browser, leveraging openness to create more room for new technologies to compete and succeed. Mistral can reach Firefox users without owning the browser, and Mozilla can integrate and recommend Mistral without removing user choice.
It is a natural extension of the principles that have shaped Firefox and the open web, and the kind of AI ecosystem we intend to continue building.
EDIT: Updated to reference gh correctly. Thanks flod!
Sometimes on Github, I need to fetch a patch from a fork I don't typically see everyday so I can try it out locally. I use the line at the top of the patch which has a copy button next to it because it's convenient.
The common steps for this are:
Click the contributor's branch and go to their github fork repository.
Copy the repository link.
Add a new git remote with an alias (typically their username).
git fetch <alias>
git checkout <alias>/<branch>
Here is a one-liner for it that you can add to your gitconfig:
You might ask, why do all of this when the github gh CLI does this for you? While it does simplify some tasks, I wanted a solution that was independant to a specific git host. The git@github.com remote that is used in the alias can be changed or made configurable if desired. This is something that I wouldn't be able to do with platform-dependant gh.
The fetch also works well with jj too because the fetch and checkout remain headless.
Formatted and commented, it looks less intimidating:
f() { # Get the repository name from your checkout (assuming it is the # original directory name as the remote). PNAME=$(basename `git rev-parse --show-toplevel`); # Parse out the fork's owner. # Example: `<owner>:<branch>` OWNER=$(echo $1 | cut -d':' -f1); # Parse out the branch name. # Example: `<owner>:<branch>` BRANCH=$(echo $1 | cut -d':' -f2); # Do a fetch of that particular branch using the extracted # information from above. # This assumes the remote is hosted on github. git fetch git@github.com:$OWNER/$PNAME.git $BRANCH; # Checkout using the alias `FETCH_HEAD` which git provides. git checkout FETCH_HEAD;};# Execute the function!# It's easier to build a function that holds variables and execute# rather than in-line it.f
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Last September, the Servo project announced that long-time maintainer Josh Bowman-Matthews (@jdm) would work part-time on improving the Servo contributor experience, entirely funded by the monthly donations on OpenCollective and GitHub. In his own words, here is a look back over the past year!
First of all, I am enormously grateful to everyone who financially supports Servo, as those donations have enabled me to devote significant time to a project that I care a lot about. Some highlights from that funded work that I'm proud of:
On top of that, I spent time diagnosing unexpected failures in others' PRs and fixed numerous intermittent test failures that made merging PRs more difficult for everyone.
A few pieces of work from this period that stand out to me:
supporting a large scale rewrite of Servo's JS engine integration to address intermittent panics related to garbage collection-I reviewed lots of pull requests, but also filed many issues that enabled the work addressing the panics to be spread across many other contributors
supporting another contributor's grant proposal to work on Servo that was approved!
This role I've carved out means a lot to me-I've found a healthy balance that allows me to spend time with my family as well as make meaningful contributions to Servo, and I get to spend a lot of time looking for ways to make the project more accessible for others. A big thank you to everybody supporting the project and my work; each individual monthly donation makes a big difference! I'm excited to see what's possible in the coming year.
As part of the Nova redesign, a "Use Linux system theme" checkbox is being shown on Linux builds for the about:addons theme picker, which will make Firefox's Nova UI use the colours of the system theme.
Replaced the "more themes" button in the themes list view footer with a promo element when Nova is enabled - Bug 2057200
Removed the testing XPI base url pref from ThemesList.sys.mjs - Bug 2053220
Fixed a mismatch between the popup panel border radius applied by Nova and the border radius applied to the document.body of the WebExtensions popup page loaded into it - Bug 2057844
Moved new strings added as part of the about:addons Nova restyling out of the locales preview - Bug 2052034
As part of legacy telemetry cleanups for the Add-ons related telemetry, migrated addons-search-detection telemetry off the legacy telemetry mirroring path, now collected only through Glean - Bug 2055606
Thanks to Florian Quèze for applying his work on an LLM-based system for investigating intermittent tests to investigating and fixing intermittents and perma failures across the WebExtensions test suite.
DevTools
Ruhollah Majdoddin fixed issues in the Storage panel to make sure we're only showing relevant cookies (and their values) for the debugged tab (#1856645, #2060029, #2061166) and also did some cleanup in this area (#2061348)
sevenwithawp added a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+B, Cmd+Alt+B on Mac) to disable/enable breakpoints (#1642578)
Did a trainhop last week to help with the remote layouts effort
Doing another trainhop this week to make some spacing optimizations, deploying tomorrow if all goes well
We will be experimenting with some more layout variations over the next few months
Example:
We've migrated a bunch of ourunittests to Jest/RTL from the deprecated Mocha / Karma framework we've historically used.
Joel added a WebNotifications badge to Top Sites on the New Tab Page which surfaces per-origin unread web-notification state directly on TopSites tiles by rendering a compact badge in the activity-stream/TopSites component-users can now glance at NTP tiles to see which sites have pending web notifications without changing navigation or site state (affects desktop and mobile NTP Top Sites UI). This is something we plan on experimenting with later this year.
Similarly, Joel added a TopSites hover card with notifications which expands the to show per-site notification items and actions on hover or long-press, enabling users to read and dismiss notifications from the NTP itself rather than opening each site.
Dre fixed the "Show more widgets" visibility by adjusting the widget container overflow/visibility logic so the Show more control is reliably revealed on constrained viewports, restoring widget discoverability.
Joel fixed newtab.closed and newtab.sections_impression firing unexpectedly on the New Tab Page by gating event emission on section visibility and tab lifecycle, which stops spurious impression and close telemetry pings and improves the accuracy of NTP impression/close counts for affected users.
Joel added a topsite display customization event to newtab ping, updating the New Tab ping schema so user topsite layout and appearance changes are emitted as topsite.display_customization events, enabling reliable capture of pin/remove/resize/customization actions in Telemetry.
Nina Pypchenko [:nina-py] added widgets.stocks.interaction and flip it on user actions so explicit click/tap interactions with the Stocks widget now generate widgets.stocks.interaction events, improving engagement capture for the Stocks surface.
Scott Downe added support for five-column content feed layouts, which enables denser content grids for large displays by updating grid logic and responsive breakpoints and affects NTP rendering on wide screens.
Irene Ni updated the New Tab topsite context menu button to respect prefers-reduced-motion via CSS/media-query changes, so users with reduce-motion enabled no longer see the button's motion/animation.
Dre reduced the Privacy Widget celebration sparkles on the New Tab Page in Privacy Widget Celebration: Reduce the Sparkles by lowering particle counts and throttling animation cadence in the widget's CSS/JS animation code, reducing visual noise and a small amount of GPU/animation work for users during the celebration without changing privacy settings.
Nova: continued work on the Nova redesign, focusing on CSS fixes, tab group and container styling, and tab/address bar polish. Efforts are underway to ensure the UI integrates correctly with platform themes and high-contrast modes.
IPC Urlbar / Multi-Context Address Bar (MCAB) on New Tab: Significant progress has been made on the IPC Urlbar implementation. The CI variant is now live and upgraded to Tier 2, allowing for better bug detection. Currently focused on making content modules content-process-safe and preparing for new tab search bar integration. Here's moz-urlbar rendering something on about:newtab for the first time:
Search & Suggest Telemetry: Development is ongoing for search term telemetry, specifically regarding fetching results from Merino for online suggestions. Also preparing to retire legacy telemetry for certain search service metrics.
We try to be responsible with data. For example, we: - store as little sensitive data as possible - monitor changes in incoming data on which we've built models But what happens when those two approaches conflict? How do we monitor changes in incoming data that we don't want to store? This talk explains the schema we use to monitor changes in what people are searching for in Firefox...even when we deliberately don't store some of what people are searching for.
This is the opposite of what I wanted to write about: relocating your MOZ_OBJDIR outside of your source directory will make your IDE faster.
In mozilla-central (the firefox monorepo), a default object files directory is created within the same source directory. This is equivalent to the build/ directory you would typically see in other projects.
While this is typically fine, I've found that Android Studio indexes many of these files and that can be slow when you're not working across all the layers in Gecko and Firefox. I ended up with these build directories that grew over time:
Directory
Last touched
Size
Files
obj-aarch64-unknown-linux-android
2025-11-04
29 G
113,116
objdir-desktop
2025-11-04
19 G
41,010
objdir-frontend
2026-09-09
6.3 G
66,930
obj-aarch64-apple-darwin24.5.0
2025-06-16
4 K
1
That's a lot to index! I figured a way around this problem is to move the OBJDIRs out of the source directory and into something like ~/.mozbuild:
While this does speed up IDE indexing, it's at the cost of developer experience, because now our generated code (e.g. FxNimbus) shows up as red symbols everywhere.
[insert sad trombone sound clip]
I'm uncertain if trimming what we index in these OBJDIRs is worth a large enough performance win, so for now I'll ensure I clean-up my stale copies which I'm not actively using.
P.S. Apologies for the delay in publishing this edition on the community blog. The original newsletter was sent to subscribers on August 27.
Firefox was leveling up in August! GeForce NOW arrived on Firefox for Windows, JPEG XL support was on the way, and the Firefox + NVIDIA teams joined forces for a Reddit AMA. We also invited SUMO and Mozilla Connect contributors to share their experiences through the Mozilla Contributor Survey, which has since closed (thank you to everyone who took the time to participate!).
Read on to catch up on what you may have missed and see what the community was up to!
GeForce NOW is now available on Firefox for Windows
Firefox has joined NVIDIA GeForce NOW's supported browser lineup, making it possible to stream more than 2,000 PC games directly from Firefox on Windows. There are no downloads, installs, or hardware upgrades required! Just a Windows PC, a GeForce NOW account, and your existing game library.
Share your voice in the Mozilla Contributor Survey 2026
We're gathering feedback from SUMO and Mozilla Connect contributors to help shape the future of Mozilla's contributor community. The 2026 Contributor Survey explores what motivates you to contribute, what matters most throughout your contributor journey, and how we can improve areas such as onboarding, recognition, and the upcoming Mozilla Connect migration to SUMO. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete and is now open until September 1, 2026, end of day UTC.
Firefox plans to ship support for JPEG XL, a modern image format designed to deliver high-quality images more efficiently. With progressive rendering, images can start appearing before they have fully downloaded so it helps make pages feel faster, especially on slower connections.
The Firefox and NVIDIA GeForce NOW teams are hosting a Reddit AMA on September 2 to celebrate GeForce NOW support on Firefox for Windows. Bring your questions about the integration, share your cloud-gaming setup, and let the teams know what else you'd love Firefox to support for online play.
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.
The 2021 SciPy conference (https://www.scipy2021.scipy.org/) involved the showcasing of the latest open source Python projects for advancement in scientific computing. Mozilla was a diversity sponsor and a few Mozillians attended and shared their experience of the event.
This talk was given as part of the Data Club Lightning Talk Session on February 11th, 2022. More on https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2022/02/25/this-week-in-glean-your-personal-glean-data-pipeline Information about Glean: https://mozilla.github.io/glean/book/index.html
