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Hi Mozillians,

For years, the Mozilla Community Newsletter has served as a monthly touchpoint for contributors and community members across the Mozilla ecosystem. Coordinated by the Customer Experience (CX) team, it helps keep our global contributor and product communities informed, connected, and engaged through updates, contributor stories, announcements, and opportunities to get involved.

While the newsletter has traditionally been distributed directly to community members, we recognize that many of these updates are valuable to a broader audience as well. That's why we're bringing our contentinto blog post format, making it easier for anyone interested in Mozilla's mission, products, and community work to stay informed.

Whether you're a longtime contributor, a Firefox enthusiast, or simply curious about what's happening across Mozilla, we hope these updates provide useful insights into the people, projects, and initiatives shaping our community.

In this edition, we're sharing our latest updates from May 2026. It's packed with the latest community news, contributor highlights, project updates, and opportunities to get involved in Mozilla's work around the world.

So, without further ado, let's dive in!

‍ From localizing to Firefox Enterprise

Long-time Mozillian Valery recently shared an open-source project he built to help Firefox Enterprise administrators manage Firefox deployments more easily called Browser Policy Manager or BPM. Beyond the tool itself, this story is a proof of the long-term value of investing in the community. Stories like Valery's show how community contributions evolve over time and why fostering a strong, engaged contributor community continues to pay dividends across the Mozilla ecosystem.

Learn more about PBM

Firefox Referrals: We want to hear from you

Could Firefox users help grow the community by recommending Firefox to friends and family? That's the question being explored in a recent Mozilla Connect discussion about potential referral programs. Join the conversation to share your thoughts on what would motivate you to recommend Firefox, and what a referral experience should (or shouldn't) look like.

Share your feedback

Web Serial finally arrives in Firefox 151

After years of community interest and requests dating back more than a decade, Firefox 151 now includes support for the Web Serial API. Developers can use Firefox to communicate with and manage serial-connected devices such as ESP boards, Raspberry Pi Picos, 3D printers, CNC machines, and other microcontrollers directly from the web. It's a long-awaited milestone for the maker and hardware community, and we're excited to finally see it land in Firefox.

Learn more

Community spotlight

In this community spotlight, we feature Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, whose work has helped bring Firefox and many other open source projects to Kazakh users. His story is a testament to the power of persistence, community, and the importance of keeping smaller languages visible online.

Read Baurzhan's story

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P.S.

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12 Jun 2026 11:28am GMT

Mozilla Champions the Reintroduction of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA)

Today, only a handful of tech companies shape the online experience for the more than 300 million internet users in America. This concentration of power is exactly why we need legislation that advances competition and user choice. It's all the more urgent as AI transforms not just the tools that people use, but also magnifies the competitive inequities underlying the web itself.

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) is bipartisan legislation designed to curb harmful gatekeeper behaviors of the biggest tech platforms. The bill does so by prohibiting dominant platforms from unfairly preferencing their own products, discriminating against tech competitors, and preventing interoperability - all practices that stop the best product winning and stifle consumer control. The goal is straightforward: companies should compete based on the quality of their products, not by leveraging anticompetitive tactics.

As the builder and operator of the Firefox browser and the browser engine Gecko, Mozilla has firsthand experience with the impact of the exclusionary practices AICOA seeks to prevent. For example, deceptive design tactics deployed by operating systems make it difficult for people to install and keep Firefox as their preferred browser. Browsers are the portal through which people access the open web, and users should define that interaction. AICOA would help limit the ability of operating systems to steer users toward affiliated products through deceptive design choices. Ensuring meaningful user choice online is not just about variety; it reflects values and individual preferences. Openness and innovation thrives when the web is built around platforms that serve people, not the other way round.

Browser engines, while lesser-known, are among the most complex and consequential pieces of infrastructure on the modern internet, impacting user-focused innovations in privacy, security, speed, and more. Gecko is one of only three widely used engines and the only independent browser engine. The importance of that competitive counterweight cannot be underestimated. When platform owners favor their own vertically integrated products, independent challengers face barriers that have nothing to do with product quality and everything to do with a monopolized market.

It's important to recognize that antitrust reform can make the internet more private and secure than it is today, as we've consistently emphasized. For example, in 2021, Firefox was at the forefront of developing technology against cross-site tracking, but could not release the technology to Firefox users on iOS because of app store rules preferring Apple's own browser engine, blocking alternatives like Gecko.

We're champions of AICOA and look forward to working with members of Congress to push this legislation forward and tackle longstanding anticompetitive practices. Mozilla thanks Senators Grassley and Klobuchar for their leadership in advancing competition. A thriving tech ecosystem requires an open, fair, and competitive market where innovative services can compete on merit and people can control their own experiences online.

The post A Handful of Companies Control the Web. AICOA Can Change That. appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

11 Jun 2026 2:05pm GMT

A while back, I stumbled onto something that turned into a rewarding side-project at Mozilla.

Firefox ships with a built-in spellchecker, but it only activates if a dictionary for your language is bundled with the browser. Coverage had grown organically over the years - driven largely by localizers and community members adding support for their own languages. Dictionary work was actually very active in the early years of the Mozilla project, but like many things in a large open-source codebase with a lot to manage, it had quietly received less attention over time, for no particularly good reason. So I decided to change that.

Taking stock

I put together a full inventory dashboard of every third-party dictionary shipped in Firefox Desktop, cataloguing sources, upstream health, and - critically - licensing.

Licensing turns out to be the main bottleneck. Firefox is open-source software, so any dictionary we ship has to carry a licence compatible with the Mozilla codebase. Some excellent dictionaries exist for languages Firefox supports, but their licences don't allow direct inclusion. In those cases, the dictionary can still reach users - but only as a Firefox extension they have to find and install manually, rather than something that just works out of the box.

The goal of the inventory wasn't to point fingers at anything. It was to make the full picture visible, so that anyone who wanted to help would know exactly where to start.

Plugging into the community

Once the inventory existed, the work was really about connecting the right people. Mozilla's localizer community already had the expertise and motivation - what was sometimes missing was a clear entry point. I took care of all the patches myself, so that localizers wouldn't have to deal with the technical side of things. This work was done in coordination with Mozilla's Localization drivers team, who own the dictionary infrastructure and reviewed and merged the changes.

The results

We expanded the number of locales shipping with a built-in dictionary from 30 to 41. This shipped last week with Firefox 151.0.3, and these improvements also benefit Thunderbird users, since both applications share the same dictionary infrastructure.

New dictionaries added: Croatian, English (UK), Georgian, Persian, Slovenian, Tajik, Tamil, Tibetan, Turkish, Welsh, and Xhosa.

Updated dictionaries: Bulgarian, Danish, French, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Polish, Romansh, and Swedish.

Stirring the pot

Part of the reason for doing this work publicly - building the inventory, filing the bugs, making the gaps visible - was to give people with the right expertise a reason to step in themselves. That's exactly what happened.

For Turkish and Russian, the existing open-source Hunspell dictionaries had become outdated - vocabulary and linguistic rules that hadn't kept pace with how the languages are actually used today. Selim (our Turkish l10n lead) and Valentin (our Russian l10n lead) each decided to take matters into their own hands.

Selim forked the TDD Turkish dictionary and updated it with modern vocabulary, better circumflex support, and performance improvements - the result is hunspell-tr-moz, now shipping in Firefox 151.0.3. Valentin built a new modern Russian dictionary from scratch, ru-spelling-dictionary, released under MPL-2.0. It's currently available as a Firefox extension - if you use Russian, Valentin would appreciate feedback on the quality before it's integrated directly into Firefox.

Both projects are public and open-source.

What's still in the pipeline

The licence question is also quietly resolving itself for a couple more locales. The maintainers of the Kabyle and Asturian dictionaries have agreed to relicense their work to allow direct inclusion in Firefox. Once that's done, those communities will join the list too.

There are still gaps in the inventory. Some are licence issues that may resolve over time. But for many of the remaining locales, the honest answer is that we simply haven't looked hard enough yet. Dictionaries are often individual passion projects or work coming out of linguistics circles - they exist, but finding them takes investigation. If you know of a dictionary for a language Firefox doesn't currently support, that's exactly the kind of lead worth following up on.

An open invitation

Mozilla is still a place where a motivated contributor can find a corner of the project, do meaningful work, and have a real impact - without needing to be a browser engineer or a Mozilla insider.

The inventory dashboard is public. If you're a localizer, a linguist, or a dictionary maintainer and you want to help bring spellchecking to more Firefox users, the gaps are clearly documented. And if you maintain a dictionary that could be included but licensing is an obstacle, that's a conversation worth having.

See you in May 2027 for the next update.

11 Jun 2026 1:59pm GMT