fidzu : thunderbird

The web should be a place where people can choose how they connect, which tools they use, and who they trust. At Mozilla, we live these values, prioritizing products that ensure users can control their experience and that the web remains a global public resource.

Challengers across the tech ecosystem provide these competitive opportunities, but they contend with structural barriers imposed by tech giants leveraging market dominance. A healthy internet depends on ensuring that independent companies have a fair opportunity to innovate and compete on merit. That's why Mozilla and many others support key legislation like AICOA.

So how do we promote proposals like AICOA and ensure that challengers can thrive in markets controlled by powerful gatekeepers? We explored these questions and more at the recent Mozilla Meetup, "How Challengers Thrive: Why Competition Matters for AI, Security, and the Open Internet." Across panel events, a lightning discussion, and a networking happy hour, we discussed promoting an innovative, secure internet.

Partnering with Internet Works, Mozilla invited leading minds in tech policy to explore the importance of Middle Tech, AI's impact on security and competition, and new research on deceptive design practices. Below are some highlights.

On today's competition landscape, and Middle Tech as a user-first alternative:

Peter Chandler, Executive Director, Internet Works:

"Less competition equals less innovation equals less choices for consumers. It's that simple."

Charlotte Slaiman, Principal, Charlotte Slaiman Impact Advising:

"There are all sorts of reasons that competition is not just a click away. There are lock-in effects. There is gatekeeper power. Those things are protecting incumbents and making it much harder for consumers to switch to an alternative."

On the impact of deceptive design tactics:

Gemma Petrie, Principal Researcher, Competition & Regulation, Mozilla:

"For independent browsers like Firefox, dominant operating systems are both the gateway to consumers and the direct competitor. When these platforms use harmful design to undermine free choice, this is not simply inconvenient. It can create consumer harm by overriding informed choice, social harm by eroding public trust in technology, and market harm by undermining competition and innovation."

On the role of AI in competition and security:

Helen Toner, Executive Director, Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET):

"It is really notable that in open source software, if you have more eyes on software and you can identify vulnerabilities, that makes it easier and quicker to patch those vulnerabilities to solve the problem. With AI, often we actually don't have very good solutions when we identify problems, when we identify security risks, and so I think that can change some of the dynamics."

Chris Lewis, President & CEO, Public Knowledge:

"We have an opportunity. It's not too late in the AI era to not only design for competition through open technology, open source AI, model weights, some of the things we heard in the introduction, but also to set policies that promote competition."

Avery Gardiner, Director of Global Competition Policy, Spotify:

"A big part of what I'm thinking about with AI is how quickly it allows us to innovate as an app developer, right, and how quickly we can speed up our coding, bring more features to consumers, bring more things to market, and be better at innovating for the consumer. And all of our competitors can do the same thing. So there's this remarkable thing where the AI opportunities, the AI services, are getting better every passing day."

There's a reason we convene this community. As the web becomes both more complex and even more integral to our lives, competition offers people the ability to make meaningful choices about privacy, security, and control. Competition fosters innovation and spurs better products and services. Now is a particularly important moment to advance these priorities.

The post How Challengers Thrive and Competition Survives In Today's Ecosystem appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

31 Aug 2026 6:16pm GMT

Hello everyone! It's Jamie. My internship at Mozilla is quite unfortunately coming to an end, after which I will be heading back to study at the University of Toronto. In this post, I want to share a rundown of my story working on the Localization (L10N) team, break down the projects I built, and reflect on what made this experience so special.

The First Day

Before joining Mozilla I was quite a bit nervous, as I had never worked at such a large organization before. The first day shattered this perception, as getting an office tour and having a live Q&A with VPs of Engineering really set the expectations of what working at Mozilla would be like.

The Toronto office became the go-to place for connecting with passionate, mission-oriented people across different teams. After getting my computer set up, I immediately got to work on Pontoon, Mozilla's Translation Management System (TMS). Since Pontoon's codebase relies on React and Django - frameworks I've worked with before - I was able to set up my local environment running smoothly and ship code early on. Over time, I had the opportunity to meet my fellow interns, each on their own teams, and we had chances to bond over our shared experiences and different problems.

Since Mozilla is a remote-first company, the L10N team is distributed across Europe and North America. Working with them was an absolute highlight. To put it simply, they are a brilliant group of people of engineers, project managers and open-source contributors who keep Mozilla, and by extension, the wider web open and accessible.

So, what was working at Mozilla like?

Working at Mozilla, I had the opportunity to contribute to a variety of features involving Pontoon, associated localization workflows and other cool projects. During the duration of my internship, a great deal of localization related work was centralized and continues to be that way, which significantly influenced the projects that I worked on, and more generally, how the L10N team will continue to operate when I am gone.

This work unfolded against the backdrop of an ever changing technological landscape, particularly involving industry adoption of AI tools for code generation. In 2025 and 2026, agentic coding assistants like Claude Code and Cursor began to achieve mass adoption in software development. At Mozilla, I was introduced to Claude Code as a tool later in my internship, which was excellent, as it allowed me to gain a broad understanding of how the codebase worked without the use of AI. After the introduction of Claude Code to my workflow, I was able to push code and conduct code reviews on a much greater scale. I appreciate that Mozilla does not shy away from the practical uses of AI, especially in the realm of improving engineer and localizer workflows, and importantly, making it a choice.

The Work

Here is a shortlist of the varying projects I had the opportunity to work on at my time with the L10N team.

GraphQL Deprecation and REST API Implementation

The first task I was assigned to primarily revolved around the deprecation of Pontoon's public-facing GraphQL API endpoints in favor of a Django REST Framework implementation. The motivations for this project included a preference for simplicity, desire for faster API response times and consistency with existing vanilla Django REST endpoints. The new public facing API lives here.

Personal Access Tokens

The next project I was given was to devise a new personal access token (PAT) implementation in Pontoon in order to gate permissions to the newly created REST API endpoints. I was inspired by the way that GitHub did their Classic personal access tokens so I tried to model my design around their implementation as much as possible.

Pontoon Translation Search

The next project I took up was to reduce the feature gap between Pontoon and Transvision. For context, Transvision was and is used for searching available translations of strings across certain Mozilla products. It uses GitHub as its primary source, which is why it is limited only to the big projects. Thus the motivation was to create a similar service directly on Pontoon that has the most up to date strings with all Mozilla products, with data manipulation and access being a non-issue due to existing on Pontoon directly. Translation Search lives here.

Taking responsibility for Pontoon Add-on

The Pontoon Add-on was a community maintained browser extension that enabled localizers to keep track of their locale's progress and receive any notifications from Pontoon directly in the browser. As part of the Pontoon API rework mentioned earlier, we needed to refactor the add-on code in order to maintain functionality. The main contributor had limited availability to continue maintaining the add-on anymore, so Mozilla assumed ownership of the extension, and we managed to clean up some of the backlog and redeploy.

Firefox for Android localization workflow changes

For years, Firefox Desktop and Firefox for Android used to operate under different localization workflows. Firefox for Android's workflow was written such that Android developers needed to maintain deprecated strings to prevent previous versions of localizations of Firefox for Android breaking. Firefox Desktop does not have this issue due to different logic, so I rewrote the whole Firefox for Android workflow to be closer in substance to Firefox Desktop's localization process. This subsequently deprecated the need for Android engineers to maintain the string deprecation process needed, which was great.

Insights Project Manager Dashboard and Alert system

The last main feature set I worked on was the Insights dashboard and accompanying alert system. For context, the Project Managers on the L10N team needed to calculate a score assigned to locales each month for community health analysis purposes using a mish mash of spreadsheets and Python scripts. This project automated the capture and calculation of these statistics to the first of each month and displayed them on a dashboard along with other useful information. The alert system was also implemented which notifies admins of significant changes of scores for specific locales, so certain locales can get increased focus.

Final Thoughts

Working at Mozilla has undoubtedly been an enriching experience. I have met a great number of incredible people who have guided me, encouraged me and shaped me into a better engineer and a better person. It has certainly widened my perspective on localization as a global effort, where peoples across different languages, cultures and creeds can work together to build a better web. I leave with sharper technical skills, amazing memories, and zero regrets, only immense gratitude for the opportunity to contribute to software that empowers millions. 🙂

Acknowledgements

To Matjaž (engineer and mentor): Your presence has been invaluable, both as a mentor and a friend. Thank you for your patience with my 10 PM deployment requests, endless questions, and edge-case bugs.

To Flod (manager): You are as always the backbone of the team, and have certainly taught me many lessons regarding leadership, professionalism and dependability. Thank you for reminding me about my deadlines and being the go-to for questions and feedback.

To Eemeli (engineer): Your Zoom call escapades have always been inspiring to me, from burning detritus, cooking random stuff, remote data lag spikes and such much more. I truly wish to become like you with such a vast and bottomless knowledge for so many facets of software engineering, before AI completely rots my brain.

To Ayush (fellow intern): I hope my mentorship was as helpful to you as your camaraderie was to me. You are going to accomplish great things, my friend.

To Eric (engineer): I very much enjoyed your unique German humor, your kindness and passion for building cool technologies.

To Camila (PM): Your personality is incredibly energetic, and I'm sure you will continue to bring so much positive energy to the team. I hope that you continue to be ambitious in everything that you do.

To Eda (PM): I really hope you enjoy working as part of the L10N team. I hope that you continue to make an excellent contribution to Mozilla!

Thank you for reading about my time at Mozilla! If you would like to learn more or wish to connect, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn.

Fin.

31 Aug 2026 6:07pm GMT

Servo 0.5.0 contains all of the changes we landed in July, which came out to 488 commits, and we now publish binaries for Linux aarch64 (@mukilan, #46760)!

DOM text selections are now visible (@mrobinson, @SimonSapin, #46698, #46864, #46742, #46889, #46126). Interactive selection is coming soon!

For security fixes, see § Security.

We've shipped several new web platform features:

• 'Cache-Control: stale-while-revalidate' (@arayaryoma, #46060)
• 'text-decoration-thickness' (@nicoburns, #46592)
• 'box-decoration-break', for the most part (@Psychpsyo, #45492)
• '@font-feature-values', for the most part (@simonwuelker, #45308)
• 'font-language-override', for the most part (@simonwuelker, #46618)
• 'font-variant-alternates', for the most part (@simonwuelker, #45308)

Plus a bunch of new DOM APIs:

• Ed448, X448, and KMAC algorithms in Subtle­Crypto (@kkoyung, #46402, #46141, #46180, #46583, #46606, #46622, #46334, #46376)
• 'insert­Horizontal­Rule', 'insert­Image', 'insert­Text', and 'forward­Delete' commands in document.exec­Command() (@Psychpsyo, #46608, #46597, #46538, #46838)
• Animation­Effect (@simonwuelker, #46677)
• new Touch() (@yezhizhen, #46741)
• duplex property on Request (@Taym95, #46858)
• effect property on Animation (@simonwuelker, #46677)
• get­Keyframes() and set­Keyframes() on Keyframe­Effect (@simonwuelker, #46118)
• id property on Largest­Contentful­Paint (@shubhamg13, #46828)
• read-only CSS­Font­Feature­Values­Rule (@simonwuelker, #46728)

This is another big update, so here's an outline:

• You can help!

• Security

• Real world compat

• Work in progress

• Embedding API

• For users and developers

• More on the web platform

• Performance and stability

• New contributors

You can help!

If you're working on a pull request that you think might be interesting for the next monthly update, even if you're not 100% sure, tell us about it by following the steps below:

1. You add the monthly update label to your pull request, or comment @servo-highfive monthly update

2. Highfive posts a comment asking you some questions

3. You answer those questions in a comment containing @servo-highfive monthly update answer

Security

Servo was potentially affected by vulnerabilities in quick-xml and crossbeam-epoch that have been fixed in Servo 0.5.0 (@atouchet, @Loirooriol, #46737, #46324). For more details, see RUSTSEC-2026-0194, RUSTSEC-2026-0195, and RUSTSEC-2026-0204.

We've updated ANGLE from a version based on Firefox 115.x ESR (02755361e26d8) to a version based on Firefox 140.12.0 ESR (f8025617e815f), which likely includes many security fixes (@jschwe, @sagudev, #46455, mozangle#100).

Real world compat

The duck on the DuckDuckGo (duckduckgo.com) landing page now renders in v0.5.0, after we fixed a preload bug that affected SVG images (@jdm, #46668).

v0.4.0

v0.5.0

Most of Gumroad (gumroad.com), except for the landing page, did not render at all in v0.4.0, but as of v0.5.0, pages like the Discover page or this product page render almost perfectly.

v0.4.0

v0.5.0

v0.4.0

v0.5.0

We're interested to hear how well your favourite websites run in Servo! Report successes in this Zulip thread, and failures in our GitHub issues.

Work in progress

The upgrade to Stylo 2026-07-01 brings several changes to built-in CSS functions (@Loirooriol, #46129):

• 'alpha()' is now supported, under --pref layout­_css­_alpha­_color­_function­_enabled

• 'progress()' is now supported, under --pref layout­_css­_progress­_function­_enabled

• 'ellipse()' values 'closest-corner' and 'farthest-corner' are no longer stable due to spec uncertainty, but they are still experimental, under --pref layout­_css­_ellipse­_corners­_enabled

• 'attr()' is more conformant, under --pref layout­_css­_attr­_enabled

Web­GPU content can now enjoy better conformance and use GPU­External­Texture and import­External­Texture() on GPU­Device, under --pref dom­_webgpu­_enabled (@sagudev, #45873, #46178, #46286).

Indexed­DB content can now use the name property on IDB­Index, under --pref dom­_indexeddb­_enabled (@skyz1, #45512).

document.fonts now includes a Font­Face for each valid '@font-face', under --pref dom­_fontface­_enabled (@simonwuelker, #46509, #46537).

All of the features above are enabled in servoshell's experimental mode.

We've started implementing WebVTT for native subtitles and captions, enabled by default (no --pref). While they don't render just yet, we can now fetch each <track src>, parse the WebVTT, and expose cues via the track property on HTML­Track­Element (@TimvdLippe, #46289, #46383).

July was a big month for accessibility in Servo, under --pref accessibility­_enabled. The focus for this month has been on performance, with the accessibility tree now supporting incremental updates (@alice, @delan, #45578, #45971, #46589, #46691, #46385), requiring fewer HashMap lookups and tree walks (@alice, @delan, #45798, #46740, #46348), and allowing for faster DOM mutations (@alice, #46348, #46530).

We've also started working on the File and Directory Entries API, to allow users to select and upload entire directories via <input type=file> and drag-and-drop. To that end, we now have webkit­Get­As­Entry() on Data­Transfer­Item, plus minimal support for File­System­Entry, File­System­Directory­Entry, and File­System­File­Entry, under --pref dom­_entries­_api­_enabled (@yezhizhen, #46456, #46879, #46832).

Embedding API

We've improved the docs for the servo crate, and for Web­View­Delegate (@mukilan, #46193).

Breaking change: Servo­Builder::webxr­_registry() has been removed. Instead use the new Servo::register­_webxr­_registry, which is a lazy design that has allowed servoshell to halve its startup time (@Narfinger, #46494).

For users and developers

servoshell for Android now runs on Android 10+ (91% market share), not just Android 13+ (68% market share), improving adaptability and reducing waste (@jschwe, #46142, #46308). We've also fixed a problem with building for Android on macOS (@jschwe, #46128).

servoshell for Windows is now better behaved when run in a console window, making the command prompt wait until servoshell exits (@yezhizhen, #43010).

When using the Firefox DevTools, the Console tab now supports some basic autocomplete (@freyacodes, #46382).

We've finished modernising servoshell for Android to use Compose UI (@veyndan, #46085, #46164, #46253, #46257, #46317, #46353, #46565, #46612, #46626, #46666, #46663, #46700), and we're now migrating Servo as a library to use Kotlin (@veyndan, #46817, #46895, #46772).

More on the web platform

Inline SVG can now use web fonts defined in the containing page (@yodalee, #45979). We're also implementing the SVG DOM, starting with stub interfaces for SVG­Element, SVG­Circle­Element, SVG­Defs­Element, SVG­Ellipse­Element, SVG­Line­Element, SVG­Linear­Gradient­Element, SVG­Path­Element, SVG­Polygon­Element, SVG­Polyline­Element, SVG­Radial­Gradient­Element, SVG­Stop­Element, SVG­Rect­Element, SVG­Symbol­Element, and SVG­Use­Element (@mu-mostafa98, #46558).

<button> now vertically centers its contents (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #46590), and behaves better with 'display: block' and 'display: inline' (@Loirooriol, #46536).

We've improved the conformance of <form> without <form action> (@kevlu93, #46860), <color> values (@Loirooriol, #46129), Gamepad­Event (@log101, #46788), document.execCommand("delete") (@Psychpsyo, #46539), the selector­Text property on CSS­Style­Rule (@simonwuelker, #46687), and Set Window Rect in WebDriver (@janeoa, #46475, #46477).

We've fixed bugs related to <iframe> (@jschwe, @jdm, #46587), <img> (@yodalee, #46892), <textarea> (@SimonSapin, @mrobinson, #46309), custom properties (@Loirooriol, #46129), '::before' and '::after' (@Loirooriol, #46640), 'flex-direction: column' (@simonwuelker, #46697), 'float' (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #46407, #46500, #46505), '@font-face' (@simonwuelker, #46568, #46271, #46436), 'position: absolute' (@simonwuelker, #46358, #46637), Blob (@jdm, #46881), IDB­Database and IDB­Object­Store and IDB­Index (@mrobinson, #46615), the adopted­Style­Sheets property on Shadow­Root (@simonwuelker, #46738), delete() on Font­Face­Set (@simonwuelker, #46634), move­Before() on Element (@mrobinson, #46599), resize­To() on Window (@janeoa, #46477), the selected property on HTML­Option­Element (@rhit-kapilaar, #46386), and the value property on HTML­Select­Element (@simonwuelker, #46230).

Performance and stability

2D canvas rendering is now multithreaded, improving frame rates by up to 55% and power consumption per frame by up to 42% (@yezhizhen, #46410), and should use a lot less memory too (@jschwe, @sagudev, #46786).

Text rendering is up to 10x faster for cases with the same text and different 'font-size' (@Loirooriol, #46129).

Flex layout benchmarks are up to 3% faster, and an improvement to get­Elements­By­Class­Name() has made some websites up to 1% faster (@Narfinger, @jdm, #46563, #46595, #46594).

We've also reduced memory usage, allocations, GC rooting steps, and other operations in many parts of Servo (@mrobinson, @jdm, @yezhizhen, @Narfinger, @Gae24, @SimonSapin, @Taym95, @cychronex-labs, @arayaryoma, #46499, #46411, #46659, #45974, #46377, #45758, #46440, #46762, #46301, #46349, #46419, #46418, #46420, #46460, #46633, #46638, #46690, #46745, #46726, #46564, #46144, #46664, #46462, #46139, #46430, #46446, #46498, #46548, #46598, #46632, #46656, #46678, #46718, #46722, #46238, #46072, #46408, #46438, #46437, #46528, #46124, #46330, #46412, #46807).

We've fixed a crash regression with memory corruption (@mrobinson, #46316), several dynamic-borrow-related crashes (@Narfinger, @SharanRP, @Taym95, @agrawalx, @amittenak47, @sungmen, #46381, #46384, #46405, #46684, #46452, #46770, #46830, #46763), plus crashes related to:

• <area> without <area href> (@simonwuelker, #46341)
• <progress> or shadow DOM (@mrobinson, @simonwuelker, #46188)
• <table> layout (@mrobinson, #46775)
• <td rowspan> (@mrobinson, #46841)
• <svg> without <svg viewBox> (@Narfinger, @mrobinson, #46199)
• <use> in SVG (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #46261)
• 'animation' (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #46689)
• 'content' (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #46314)
• 'mix-blend-mode' (@mrobinson, #45624)
• Array­Buffer (@jdm, #46504)
• adopted­Style­Sheets on Document (@TimvdLippe, #46373)
• exec­Command("delete") on Document (@TimvdLippe, #46265)
• removing DOM nodes (@SimonSapin, #46866)

We've continued our long-running effort to use the Rust type system to make Servo's integration with SpiderMonkey safer and more reliable (@Gae24, @Narfinger, @TimvdLippe, @jdm, @kunalmohan, @lumiscosity, @simonwuelker, #46191, #46777, #46890, #46243, #46248, #46246, #46310, #46312, #46333, #46147, #46150, #46151, #46229, #46262, #46375, #46374, #46529, #46584, #46585, #46593, #46693, #46166, #46156, #46254, #46267, #46268, #46269, #46270, #46284, #46285, #46318, #46435, #46461).

New contributors

A special thanks to the following people for landing their first patch in Servo:

• Umut Cevdet Koçak (@UMCEKO, #46256)
• Yash Agrawal (@agrawalx, #46770)
• amittenak47 (@amittenak47, #46743)
• Apoorva Pendse (@apoorvapendse, #46739)
• dDostalker (@dDostalker, #46181)
• Oisín Ó Maolchathail (@eachra-bawn, #46478)
• Kevin Lu (@kevlu93, #46860)
• Mohamed Mostafa (@mu-mostafa98, #45405)
• SeongMan Jeon (@sungmen, #46763)
• Yoda Lee (@yodalee, #45979)

Interested in helping build a web browser? Take a look at our curated list of issues that are good for new contributors!

Donations

Thanks again for your generous support! We are now receiving 7824 USD/month (+1.8% from June) in recurring donations. This helps us cover the cost of our speedy CI and benchmarking servers, one of our latest Outreachy interns, and funding maintainer work that helps more people contribute to Servo.

Servo is also on thanks.dev, and already 35 GitHub users (same as June) that depend on Servo are sponsoring us there. If you use Servo libraries like url, html5ever, selectors, or cssparser, signing up for thanks.dev could be a good way for you (or your employer) to give back to the community.

We now have sponsorship tiers that allow you or your organisation to donate to the Servo project with public acknowlegement of your support. If you're interested in this kind of sponsorship, please contact us at join@servo.org.

7824 USD/month

10000

Use of donations is decided transparently via the Technical Steering Committee's public funding request process, and active proposals are tracked in servo/project#187. For more details, head to our Sponsorship page.

31 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT