13 Apr 2026

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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