fidzu : thunderbird

If you can believe it, Thunderbird for Android has been out for just over a year! In this episode of our Community Office Hours, Heather and Monica check back in with the mobile team after our chat with them back in January. Sr. Software Engineer Wolf Montwé and our new Manager of Mobile Apps, Jon Bott look back at what the growing mobile team has been able to accomplish this last year, what we're still working on, and what's up ahead.

We'll be back next month, talking with members of the desktop team all about Exchange support landing in Thunderbird 145!

Thunderbird for Android: One Year Later

The biggest visual change to the app since last year is the new Account Drawer. The mobile team wants to help users easily tell their accounts apart and switch between them. While this is still a work in progress, we've started making these changes in Thunderbird 11.0. We know not everyone is excited about UI changes, but we hope most users like these initial changes!

Another major but hidden change involves updating our very old code, which came from K-9 Mail. Much of the K-9 code goes back to 2009! Having to work with old code explains why some fixes or new features, which should be simple, turn out to be complex and time consuming. Changes end up affecting more components than we expect, which cause delivery timelines to change from a week to months.

We are also still working to proactively eliminate tech debt, which will make the code more reliable and secure, plus allow future improvements and feature additions to be done more quickly. Even though the team didn't eliminate as much tech debt as they planned, they feel the work they've done this year will help reduce even more next year.

Over this past year, the team has also realized Thunderbird for Android users have different needs from K-9 Mail users. Thunderbird desktop users want more features from the desktop app, and this is definitely a major goal we have for our future development. The current feature gap won't always be here!

Recently, the mobile team has started moving to a monthly release cadence, similar to Firefox and the monthly Thunderbird channel. Changing from bi-monthly to monthly reduces the risks of changing huge amounts of code all at once. The team can make more incremental changes, like the account drawer, in a smaller window. Regular, "bite size" changes allow us to have more conversation with the community. The development team also benefits because they can make better timelines and can more accurately predict the amount of work needed to ship future releases.

A Growing Team and Community

Since we released the Android app, the mobile team and contributor community has grown! One of the unexpected benefits of growing the team and community has been improved documentation. Documentation makes things visible for our talented engineers and existing volunteers, and makes it easier for newcomers to join the project!

Our volunteers have made some incredible contributions to the app! Translators have not only bolstered popular languages like German and French, but have enabled previously unsupported languages. In addition to localization, community members have helped develop the app. Shamin-emon has taken on complicated changes, and has been very patient when some of his proposed changes were delayed. Arnt, another community member, debugged and patched an issue with utf-8 strings in IMAP. And Platform34 triaged numerous issues to give developers insights into reported bugs.

Finally, we're learning how to balance refactoring and improving an Android app, and at the same time building an iOS app from scratch! Both apps are important, but the team has had to think about what's most important in each app. Android development is focusing on prioritizing top bugs and splitting the work to fix them into bite size pieces. With iOS, the team can develop in small increments from the start. Fortunately, the growing team and engaged community is making this balancing act easier than it would have been a year ago.

Looking Forward

In the next year, what can Android users look forward to? At the top of the priority list is better architecture leading to a better user experience, along with view and Message List improvements, HTML signatures, and JMAP support. For the iOS app, the team is focused on getting basic functionality like place, such as reading and writing mail, attachments, and work on the JMAP and IMAP protocols.

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Listen to the Episode

The post VIDEO: An Android Retrospective appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

14 Nov 2025 6:00pm GMT

Servo now supports several new web platform features:

• <source> in <video> and <audio> (@tharkum, #39717)
• CompressionStream and DecompressionStream (@kkoyung, #39658)
• fetchLater() (@TimvdLippe, #39547)
• Document.parseHTMLUnsafe() (@lukewarlow, #40246)
• the which property on UIEvent (@Taym95, #40109)
• the relatedTarget property on UIEvent (@TimvdLippe, #40182)
• self.name and .onmessageerror in dedicated workers (@yerke, #40156)
• name and areas properties on HTMLMapElement (@tharkum, #40133)

servoshell for macOS now ships as native Apple Silicon binaries (@jschwe, #39981). Building servoshell for macOS x86-64 still works for now, but is no longer officially supported by automated testing in CI (see § For developers).

In servoshell for Android, you can now enable experimental mode with just two taps (@jdm, #40054), use the software keyboard (@jdm, #40009), deliver touch events to web content (@mrobinson, #40240), and dismiss the location field (@jdm, #40049). Pinch zoom is now fully supported in both Servo and servoshell, taking into account the locations of pinch inputs (@mrobinson, @atbrakhi, #40083) and allowing keyboard scrolling when zoomed in (@mrobinson, @atbrakhi, #40108).

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<figcaption>servoshell on Android. Left: you can now turn on experimental mode in the settings menu. Right: we now support the soft keyboard and touch events.</figcaption>

AbortController and AbortSignal are now enabled by default (@jdm, @TimvdLippe, #40079, #39943), after implementing AbortSignal.timeout() (@Taym95, #40032) and fixing throwIfAborted() on AbortSignal (@Taym95, #40224). If this is the first time you've heard of them, you might be surprised how important they are for real-world web compat! Over 40% of Google Chrome page loads at least check if they are supported, and many popular websites including GitHub and Discord are broken without them.

XPath is now enabled by default (@simonwuelker, #40212), after implementing '@attr/parent' queries (@simonwuelker, #39749), Copy > XPath in the DevTools Inspector (@simonwuelker, #39892), completely rewriting the parser (@simonwuelker, #39977), and landing several other fixes (@simonwuelker, #40103, #40105, #40161, #40167, #39751, #39764).

Servo now supports new KeyboardEvent({keyCode}) and ({charCode}) (@atbrakhi, #39590), which is enough to get Speedometer 3.0 and 3.1 working on macOS.

ImageData can now be sent over postMessage() and structuredClone() (@Gae24, #40084).

Layout engine

Our layout engine can now render text in synthetic bold (@minghuaw, @mrobinson, #39519, #39681, #39633, #39691, #39713), and now selects more appropriate fallback fonts for Kanji in Japanese text (@arayaryoma, #39608).

'initial-scale' now does the right thing in <meta name=viewport> (@atbrakhi, @shubhamg13, @mrobinson, #40055).

We've improved the way we handle 'border-radius' (@Loirooriol, #39571) and margin collapsing (@Loirooriol, #36322). While they're fairly unassuming fixes on the surface, both of them allowed us to find interop issues in the big incumbent engines (@Loirooriol, #39540, #36321) and help improve web standards (@noamr, @Loirooriol, csswg-drafts#12961, csswg-drafts#12218).

In other words, Servo is good for the web, even if you're not using it yet!

Embedding and ecosystem

Our HTML-compatible XPath implementation now lives in its own crate, and it's no longer limited to the Servo DOM (@simonwuelker, #39546). We don't have any specific plans to release this as a standalone library just yet, but please let us know if you have a use case that would benefit from this!

You can now take screenshots of webviews with WebView::take_screenshot (@mrobinson, @delan, #39583).

Historically Servo has struggled with situations causing 100% CPU usage or unnecessary work on every tick of the event loop, whenever a page is considered "active" or "animating" (#25305, #3406). We had since throttled animations (@mrobinson, #37169) and reflows (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #38431), but only to fixed rates of 120 Hz and 60 Hz respectively.

But starting this month, you can run Servo with vsync, thanks to the RefreshDriver trait (@coding-joedow, @mrobinson, #39072), which allows embedders to tell Servo when to start rendering each frame. The default driver continues to run at 120 Hz, but you can define and install your own with ServoBuilder::refresh_driver.

Breaking changes

Servo's embedding API has had a few breaking changes:

• Opts::wait_for_stable_image was removed; to wait for a stable image, call WebView::take_screenshot instead (@mrobinson, @delan, #39583).

• MouseButtonAction::Click was removed; use Down followed by Up. Click events need to be derived from mouse button downs and ups to ensure that they are fired correctly (@mrobinson, #39705).

• Scrolling is now derived from mouse wheel events. When you have mouse wheel input to forward to Servo, you should now call WebView::notify_input_event only, not notify_scroll_event (@mrobinson, @atbrakhi, #40269).

• WebView::set_pinch_zoom was renamed to pinch_zoom, to better reflect that pinch zoom is always relative (@mrobinson, @atbrakhi, #39868).

We've improved page zoom in our webview API (@atbrakhi, @mrobinson, @shubhamg13, #39738), which includes some breaking changes:

• WebView::set_zoom was renamed to set_page_zoom, and it now takes an absolute zoom value. This makes it idempotent, but it means if you want relative zoom, you'll have to multiply the zoom values yourself.
• Use the new WebView::page_zoom method to get the current zoom value.
• WebView::reset_zoom was removed; use set_page_zoom(1.0) instead.

Some breaking changes were also needed to give embedders a more powerful way to share input events with webviews (@mrobinson, #39720). Often both your app and the pages in your webviews may be interested in knowing when users press a key. Servo handles these situations by asking the embedder for all potentially useful input events, then echoing some of them back:

1. Embedder calls WebView::notify_input_event to tell Servo about an input event, then web content (and Servo) can handle the event.
2. Servo calls WebViewDelegate::notify_keyboard_event to tell the embedder about keyboard events that were neither canceled by scripts nor handled by Servo itself. The event details is included in the arguments.

Embedders had no way of knowing when non-keyboard input events, or keyboard events that were canceled or handled by Servo, have completed all of their effects in Servo. This was good enough for servoshell's overridable key bindings, but not for WebDriver, where commands like Perform Actions need to reliably wait for input events to be handled. To solve these problems, we've replaced notify_keyboard_event with notify_input_event_handled:

1. Embedder calls WebView::notify_input_event to tell Servo about an input event, then web content (and Servo) can handle the event. This now returns an InputEventId, allowing embedders to remember input events that they still care about for step 2.
2. Servo calls WebViewDelegate::notify_input_event_handled to tell the embedder about every input event, when Servo has finished handling it. The event details are not included in the arguments, but you can use the InputEventId to look up the details in the embedder.

Perf and stability

Servo now does zero unnecessary layout work when updating canvases and animated images, thanks to a new "UpdatedImageData" layout mode (@mrobinson, @mukilan, #38991).

We've fixed crashes when clicking on web content on Android (@mrobinson, #39771), and when running Servo on platforms where JIT is forbidden (@jschwe, @sagudev, #40071, #40130).

For developers

CI builds for pull requests should now take 70% less time, since they now run on self-hosted CI runners (@delan, #39900, #39915). Bencher builds for runtime benchmarking now run on our new dedicated servers, so our Speedometer and Dromaeo data should now be more accurate and less noisy (@delan, #39272).

We've now switched all of our macOS builds to run on arm64 (@sagudev, @jschwe, #38460, #39968). This helps back our macOS releases with thorough automated testing on the same architecture as our releases, but we can't run them on self-hosted CI runners yet, so they may be slower for the time being.

Work is underway to set up faster macOS arm64 runners on our own servers (@delan, ci-runners#64), funded by your donations. Speaking of which!

Donations

Thanks again for your generous support! We are now receiving 5753 USD/month (+1.7% over September) 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. Keep an eye out for further CI improvements in the coming months, including faster macOS arm64 builds and ten-minute WPT builds.

Servo is also on thanks.dev, and already 28 GitHub users (same as September) 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.

5753 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.

14 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn't perfect, but we know the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for human connection, and lets everyone find where they belong - their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can't get enough of, the sites and forums that shaped them, and how they would design their own corner of the web.

We caught up with Jacque Aye, the author behind "Diary of a Sad Black Woman." She talks about blogging culture, writing fiction for "perpetually sighing adults" and Lily Allen's new album.

What is an internet deep dive that you can't wait to jump back into?

Right now, I'm deep diving into Lily Allen's newest album! Not for the gossip, although there's plenty of that to dive into, but for the psychology behind it all. I appreciate creatives who share so vulnerably but in nuanced and honest ways. Sharing experiences is what makes us feel human, I think. The way she outlined falling in love, losing herself, struggling with insecurities, and feeling numb was so relatable to me. Now, would I share as many details? Probably not. But I do feel her.

What was the first online community you engaged with?

Blogger. I was definitely a Blogger baby, and I used to share my thoughts and outfits there, the same way I currently share on Substack. I sometimes miss those times and my little oversharing community. Most people didn't really have personal brands then, so everything felt more authentic, anonymous and free.

What is the one tab you always regret closing?

Substack! I always find the coolest articles, save the tab, then completely forget I meant to read it, ahhhh.

What can you not stop talking about on the internet right now?

I post about my books online to an obsessive and almost alarming degree, ha. I've been going on and on about my weird, whimsical, and woeful novels, and people seem to resonate with that. I describe my work as Lemony Snicket meets a Boots Riley movie, but for perpetually sighing adults. I also never, ever shut up about my feelings. You can even read my diary online. For free. On Substack.

If you could create your own corner of the internet, what would it look like?

I feel super lucky to have my own little corner of the internet! In my corner, we love wearing cute outfits, listening to sad girl music, watching Tim Burton movies, and reading about flawed women going through absurd trials.

What articles and/or videos are you waiting to read/watch right now?

I can't wait to settle in and watch Knights of Guinevere! It looks so, so good, and I adore the creator.

What is your favorite corner of the internet?

This will seem so random, but right now, besides Substack, I'm really loving Threads. People are so vulnerable on there, and so willing to share personal stories and ask for help and advice. I love any space where I can express the full range of my feelings… and also share my books and outfits, ha.

How do you imagine the next version of the internet supporting creators who lead with emotion and care?

I really hope the next version of the internet reverts back to the days of Blogger and Tumblr. Where people could design their spaces how they see fit, integrate music and spew their hearts out without all the judgment.

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Jacque Aye is an author and writes "Diary of a Sad Black Woman" on Substack. As a woman who suffers from depression and social anxiety, she's made it her mission to candidly share her experiences with the hopes of helping others dealing with the same. This extends into her fiction work, where she pens tales about woeful women trying their best, with a surrealist, magical touch. Inspired by authors like Haruki Murakami, Sayaka Murata, and Lemony Snicket, Jacque's stories are dark, magical, and humorous with a hint… well, a bunch… of absurdity.

The post The writer behind 'Diary of a Sad Black Woman' on making space for feelings online appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

13 Nov 2025 6:26pm GMT