fidzu : thunderbird

Mozilla has long called for US antitrust reform in digital markets. After several false starts, real change has yet to materialize. In the meantime, dominant tech players have further entrenched their hold, limiting choice and degrading people's experiences. Integration of new AI services into existing ecosystems is enabling those same companies to perpetuate and accelerate that power.

But, there's reason for optimism. Momentum is again building toward antitrust reform, and this time feels different. With support from start ups, middle tech challengers, civil society, and think tanks across the political spectrum - and most importantly, legislative champions in Congress - it's clear that the time is coming.

This is a debate about how the largest tech companies control the products and innovations in the market, and access to the services the people use every day. At the center are questions about user choice, interoperability, privacy, security and whether independent innovators have an opportunity to compete on merit.

These topics were the focus of a recent Senate briefing hosted by Bull Moose Project and Public Knowledge, diving in on three competition bills before the Senate Judiciary Committee: The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), the Open App Markets Act (OAMA), and the America Act. The discussion brought together policy experts and industry voices, including Mozilla, to explore how competition policy can improve people's experiences online and the ability of challenger companies to succeed.

The conversation covered a range of issues, from whether existing antitrust laws are equipped to address today's digital markets, to misguided claims about what might happen if we pass antitrust reform, and the ways that dominant platforms dictate how people discover and use competing products. For Mozilla, an important part of the conversation is what meaningful user choice looks like in practice. People should be able to choose alternatives, and those choices should be respected. But structural barriers can make it harder for independent players to compete on merit, and for people to access options, including independent products that innovate in areas like privacy and security. Competition creates stronger incentives for companies to build better, and to give people the protections and products that they deserve.

Antitrust reform is not about punishing companies for being successful. It's about ensuring that independent players can provide the best possible versions of their products, and that people can truly benefit from those innovations. That's why Mozilla, alongside many others, has long championed AICOA and worked to tackle longstanding anticompetitive practices. We're excited to see newly energized support across the public and private sector, and for the next steps in advancing legislation.

The post A Reason for Optimism on US Competition Policy appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

27 Oct 2026 12:05am GMT

If your online activities involve logging in and out of a lot of different accounts - often on the same website - Profile Manager Pro can be a time-saving game changer. The extension provides a one-click login process for multiple online accounts, so you can effortlessly jump between profiles. From social media management to web development, QA testing and more, Profile Manager Pro removes the painstaking friction of constant account switching.

"One of the most interesting aspects of developing Profile Manager Pro is realizing how many different workflows can benefit from efficient account switching," explains its creator, Islam Elsayed. Consider developers who need to save sessions for different roles, such as admins, moderators or regular users, to test functionality; freelancers working across multiple client dashboards; or support professionals investigating account-specific behavior. The potential uses for Profile Manager Pro are practically limitless.

Elsayed makes clear that Profile Manager Pro isn't intended to replace Firefox's full browser profiles; rather, the aim is to make it easier to save, organize, and restore individual website sessions within a browser environment. "I think that distinction is important because it illustrates how browser extensions can complement existing browser capabilities by addressing very specific everyday frustrations."

While the extension provides a fairly straightforward function, its design and development were anything but simple. Elsayed says his biggest development hurdle was creating a reliable account-switching experience across websites that handle authentication and session management differently. Modern websites often use tangled combinations of cookies, browser storage, authentication tokens and other complex security mechanisms. A technical solution that works perfectly on one website may not function at all on another. "These challenges taught me an important lesson: The best productivity tools often hide considerable technical complexity behind a simple user experience."

Another challenge is balancing functionality with user privacy and security. Session-management extensions interact with sensitive browser data, so Elsayed goes to great lengths to ensure user protection - starting with a local-first approach to development. Saved session information stays within the user's browser environment by default. Users don't need to create a Profile Manager Pro account or send their browsing sessions to a third-party server. The extension also offers optional encrypted Google Drive sync, providing even more control over stored data.

"Responsible session management is essential," says Elsayed. "This is why I believe privacy should be considered throughout the design process rather than an afterthought. Ultimately, my goal is to give users convenience without requiring them to surrender unnecessary control over their data."

As for future development plans, Elsayed frames Profile Manager Pro as an "evolving project." He intends to focus on optimizing the profile management system and improving backup and sync experiences.

"My long-term vision for Profile Manager Pro is to become an increasingly powerful yet lightweight tool for managing online identities and workflows," says Elsayed. "I believe thoughtful improvements based on real user needs are more valuable than adding features simply for the sake of adding them. For me, the most rewarding part of development is solving those complex problems so users don't have to think about them."

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

The post Developer Spotlight: Profile Manager Pro appeared first on Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog.

26 Oct 2026 10:24pm GMT

TLDR:

• To fund general maintenance, donate to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund or sponsor the RustNL Maintainers Team
• To fund specific features and improvements, sponsor fundable Rust Project Goals
• To fund individual contributors, donate to their GitHub Sponsors accounts

There is always so much to do in the Rust Project! New features to implement, bugs to fix, performance optimizations to make, issues to triage… It takes a lot of work to keep our high bar of quality while also shipping new features and improvements. And the workload keeps increasing with the continuous growth of Rust adoption.

As is unfortunately common in open source projects, a large fraction of that work is currently done by volunteers. That causes various issues, such as people burning out or complex features taking many years to ship.

Unsurprisingly, one of the best ways to help improve that is to get more people who work on Rust funded! This year, several funding initiatives started ramping up, and we already experience many positive effects. They helped us improve the maintenance status of critical Rust projects and make significant progress on several long-awaited features, such as allocators, the never type, the next trait solver or the Polonius borrow checker. However, only a fraction of people working on Rust are currently funded for their work.

We know that there are Rust users, both individuals and companies, who would like to help improve Rust by funding it, but it might not always be obvious how exactly to do that. This post thus provides suggestions on how you can support the development of Rust in three ways.

If you're unsure which option fits, or would like to discuss funding on behalf of your company, please contact the Funding team.

Fund general maintenance

Maintenance is a continuous process required to keep Rust (or any software project for that matter) working. It consists of two main activities. The first is general housekeeping, such as ensuring that Continuous Integration works, dependencies are kept up-to-date and issues, bugs and security incidents are promptly triaged and resolved. The second is performing refactorings and code reviews, which ensures that the codebase will be able to evolve and continuously ship new features, without accruing extensive technical debt.

Having quality maintenance is crucial for the long-term health of Rust, yet it is typically very difficult to find funding for it; funders often want to sponsor specific new features, rather than just "keeping the lights on". However, without sufficient maintenance, it becomes much more difficult, and much slower, to ship new features. Improving the maintenance of Rust thus also helps us ship features and improvements faster, though the effects are sometimes only observable over longer periods of time.

Funding maintenance is a great choice if you want to let us decide how best to improve Rust. The Rust Funding team continuously looks for Rust teams and projects that require help with their maintenance efforts, and allocates available funds to Rust maintainers who could help improve the situation.

To fund Rust maintainers, consider donating to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund or sponsoring the RustNL Maintainers Team.

Fund specific features and improvements

There are always many Rust improvements and new features that are in progress. We track some of those initiatives through Rust Project Goals. Each Goal describes a specific improvement to Rust: what it is, who is going to develop and drive it forward and which Rust teams are willing to help reviewing and maintaining it.

Some of those Goals are looking for funding. Either to help their owner dedicate time and focus to push the given feature forward, or to fund maintainers who will perform refactorings necessary to unblock that feature and review its implementation. Often funding is required for both. When a Goal is properly funded, the probability that it will achieve its milestones is much higher, which then translates in the given improvement being shipped sooner to Rust users.

Funding Project Goals is a great choice if you want to help push forward specific Rust features or Rust toolchain improvements that will benefit you or your company.

To fund contributors working on Project Goals, consider taking a look at Goals that need funding and reaching out to their funding contact. If in doubt how to proceed, reach out to the Rust Funding team.

Fund individual contributors

There are hundreds of people in the Rust Project who continuously work on improving Rust. Some of them have personal fundraising profiles (e.g. on GitHub Sponsors), which allows you to support them directly.

There might be various reasons for supporting a specific person. Maybe they are maintaining a crate that you love to use, maybe you like reading their blog posts, or maybe you are simply a fan of the work that they do. Whatever the reason, we are sure that they would appreciate your support!

Funding individual contributors is a great choice if you want to directly support Rust contributors whose work you appreciate.

To fund individual Rust contributors, check out their GitHub profile or personal website to see what options there are for supporting them. You can also examine our list of Rust Project members who can be supported through GitHub Sponsors^[1].

Conclusion

We hope that this post is useful to anyone who would potentially like to invest funds into making Rust better. You can also find a shortened version of the "how to fund Rust guide" at the Funding page of the Rust website, or check out a RustConf 2026 talk by Niko Matsakis about how Project Goals and their funding works.

If you are a company looking to fund the development of Rust, consider joining the Rust Commercial Network. Joining the network is free, and Rust Foundation membership is not required. It can help you find opportunities for funding improvements in specific areas related to Rust usage (e.g. user interfaces, language interop, supply chain security, etc.) and collaborate on funding Rust development with other companies.

There are of course other ways of helping Rust other than donating funds. For example, you can check out Project Goals that are looking for contributors or more generally check our contributor onboarding guide. Companies can also help by giving employees paid time to contribute upstream, or by hiring Rust contributors to do that work. One possible model is the Engineer in Residence role, that was recently established in the Rust Foundation.

1. Note that this list is not exhaustive; there are some Project members who accept donations through GitHub Sponsors (or another fundraising platform), but did not opt into being listed on this page. ↩

26 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT