thunderbird

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

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @thisweekinrust.bsky.social on Bluesky or @ThisWeekinRust on mastodon.social, or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub and archives can be viewed at this-week-in-rust.org. If you find any errors in this week's issue, please submit a PR.

Want TWIR in your inbox? Subscribe here.

Updates from Rust Community

Official

Newsletters

Project/Tooling Updates

Observations/Thoughts

Rust Walkthroughs

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is rustion, a SSH bastion server.

Thanks to handewo for the self-suggestion!

Please submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Calls for Testing

An important step for RFC implementation is for people to experiment with the implementation and give feedback, especially before stabilization.

If you are a feature implementer and would like your RFC to appear in this list, add a call-for-testing label to your RFC along with a comment providing testing instructions and/or guidance on which aspect(s) of the feature need testing.

No calls for testing were issued this week by Rust, Cargo, Rustup or Rust language RFCs.

Let us know if you would like your feature to be tracked as a part of this list.

Call for Participation; projects and speakers

CFP - Projects

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but did not know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!

Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.

If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here or through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on Bluesky or Mastodon!

CFP - Events

Are you a new or experienced speaker looking for a place to share something cool? This section highlights events that are being planned and are accepting submissions to join their event as a speaker.

If you are an event organizer hoping to expand the reach of your event, please submit a link to the website through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on Bluesky or Mastodon!

Updates from the Rust Project

526 pull requests were merged in the last week

Compiler

Library

Cargo

strip CR from cargo:token-from-stdout

Rustdoc

Clippy

Rust-Analyzer

Rust Compiler Performance Triage

A fairly noisy week, with a bunch of small regressions contained within, leading to a slight increase on average in instruction counts. This week had a lot of large rollups, likely due to some CI problems, but thankfully many of those came with pre-triaged perf results by the time (thank you to those triagers!). Roughly similar slight regressions for cycles and wall times across the week.

Triage done by @simulacrum. Revision range: 4804ad7e..f3ef3bd8

2 Regressions, 0 Improvements, 10 Mixed; 5 of them in rollups 32 artifact comparisons made in total

Full report here

Approved RFCs

Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:

#![register_{attribute,lint}_tool]

Final Comment Period

Every week, the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now.

Tracking Issues & PRs

Rust

Compiler Team (MCPs only)

Deny todo!() in tidy

Leadership Council

Rust All Hands 2027

No Items entered Final Comment Period this week for Rust RFCs, Cargo, Language Team, Language Reference or Unsafe Code Guidelines.

Let us know if you would like your PRs, Tracking Issues or RFCs to be tracked as a part of this list.

New and Updated RFCs

RFC for convenient, explicit closure capture using move($expr) expressions

Upcoming Events

Rusty Events between 2026-06-10 - 2026-07-08 🦀

South America

2026-06-18 | Florianópolis, BR | Rust SC
- Rust Floripa

If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Please remember to add a link to the event too. Email the Rust Community Team for access.