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Please note some of the information provided in this report may be subject to change as we are sometimes sharing information about projects that are still in early stages and are not final yet. 

Welcome!

Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!

New content and projects What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop Tab Groups

Tab groups are now available in Nightly 136! To create a group in Nightly, all you have to do is have two tabs open, click and drag one tab to the other, pause a sec and then drop. From there the tab group editor window will appear where you can name the group and give it a color. After saving, the group will appear on your tab bar.

Once you create a group, you can easily access your groups from the overflow menu on the right.

 

These work great in the sidebar and vertical tabs feature that was released in the Firefox Labs feature in Nightly 131!

New profile selector

The new profile selector which we have been localizing over the previous months is now starting to roll out gradually to users in Nightly 136. SUMO has an excellent article about all the new changes which you can find here.

What’s new or coming up in web projects AMO and AMO Frontend

The team is planning to migrate/copy the Spanish (es) locale into four: es-AR, es-CL, es-ES, and es-MX. Per the community managers’ input, all locales will retain the suggestions that have not been approved at the time of migration. Be on the lookout for the changes in the upcoming week(s).

Mozilla Accounts

The Mozilla accounts team recently landed strings used in three emails planned to be sent over the course of 90 days, with the first happening in the coming weeks. These will be sent to inactive users who have not logged in or interacted with the Mozilla accounts service in 2 years, letting them know their account and data may be deleted.

What’s new or coming up in SUMO

The CX team is still working on 2025 planning. In the meantime, read a recap from our technical writer, Lucas Siebert about how 2024 went in this blog post. We will also have a community call coming up on Feb 5th at 5 PM UTC. Check out the agenda for more detail and we’d love to see you there!

Last but not least, we will be at FOSDEM 2025. Mozilla’s booth will be at the K building, level 1. Would love to see you if you’re around!

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon New Email Features

We’re excited to announce two new email features that will keep you better informed and connected with your localization work on Pontoon:

Email Notifications: Opt in to receive notifications via email, ensuring you stay up to date with important events even when you’re away from the platform. You can choose between daily or weekly digests and subscribe to specific notification types only.

Monthly Activity Summary: If enabled, you’ll receive an email summary at the start of each month, highlighting your personal activity and key activities within your teams for the previous month.

Visit your settings to explore and activate these features today!

New Translation Memory tools are here!

If you are a locale manager or translator, here’s what you can do from the new TM tab on your team page:

• Search, edit, and delete Translation Memory entries with ease.
• Upload .TMX files to instantly share your Translation Memories with your team.

These tools are here to save you time and boost the quality of suggestions from Machinery. Dive in and explore the new features today!

Moving to GitHub Discussions

Feedback, support and conversations on new Pontoon developments have moved from Discourse to GitHub Discussions. See you there!

Newly published localizer facing documentation

• How to test mozilla.org was updated to reflect some of the changes to the site in the last year or so.

Events

Come check out our end of year presentation on Pontoon! A Youtube link and AirMozilla link are available.

Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Contact us and we’ll include it.

Friends of the Lion

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact us and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out!

Useful Links

• #l10n-community channel on Element (chat.mozilla.org)
• Localization category on Discourse
• Mastodon
• L10n blog

Questions? Want to get involved?

If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

• Francesco Lodolo (flod) – Engineering Manager
• Bryan – l10n Project Manager
• Delphine – l10n Project Manager for mobile
• Peiying (CocoMo) – l10n Project Manager for mozilla.org, marketing, and legal
• Francis – l10n Project Manager for Common Voice, Mozilla Foundation
• Théo Chevalier – l10n Project Manager for Mozilla Foundation
• Matjaž (mathjazz) – Pontoon dev
• Eemeli – Pontoon, Fluent dev

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve it.

Firefox is typically installed on macOS by downloading a DMG (Disk iMaGe) file, and dragging the Firefox.app into /Applications. These DMG files are compressed to reduce download time. As of Firefox 136, we’re making an under the hood change to them, and switching from bzip2 to lzma compression, which shrinks their size by ~9% and cuts decompression time by ~50%.

Why now?

If you’re familiar with macOS packaging, you’ll know that LZMA support was introduced in macOS 10.15, all the way back in 2015. However, Firefox continued to support older versions of macOS until Firefox 116.0 was released in August 2023, which meant that we couldn’t use it prior to then.

But that still begs the question: why wait ~18 months later to realize these improvements? Answering that question requires a bit of explanation of how we package Firefox…

Packaging Firefox for macOS… on Linux!

Most DMGs are created with hdiutil, a standard tool that ships with macOS. hdiutil is a fine tool, but unfortunately, it only runs natively on macOS. This a problem for us, because we package Firefox thousands of times per day, and it is impractical to maintain a fleet of macOS machines large enough to support this. Instead, we use libdmg-hfsplus, a 3rd party tool that runs on Linux, to create our DMGs. This allows us to scale these operations as much as needed for a fraction of the cost.

Why now, redux

Until recently, our fork of libdmg-hfsplus only supported bzip2 compression, which of course made it impossible for us to use lzma. Thanks to some recent efforts by Dave Vasilevsky, a wonderful volunteer who previously added bzip2 support, it now supports lzma compression.

We quietly enabled this for Firefox Nightly in 135.0, and now that it’s had some bake time there, we’re confident that it’s ready to be shipped on Beta and Release.

Why LZMA?

DMGs support many types of compression: bzip2, zlib, lzfse and lzma being the most notable. Each of these has strengths and weaknesses:

• bzip2 has the best compression (in terms of size) that is supported on all macOS versions, but the slowest decompression
• zlib has very fast decompression, at the cost of increased package size
• lzfse has the fastest decompression, but the second largest package size
• lzma has the second fastest decompression and the best compression in terms of size, at the cost of increased compression times

With all of this in mind, we chose lzma to make improvements on both download size and installation time.

You may wonder why download size is an important consideration, seeing as fast broadband connections are common these days. This may be true in many places, but not everyone has the benefits of a fast unmetered connection. Reducing download size has an outsized impact for users with slow connections, or those who pay for each gigabyte used.

What does this mean for you?

Absolutely nothing! Other than a quicker installation experience, you should see absolutely no changes to the Firefox installation experience.

Of course, edge cases exist and bugs are possible. If you do notice something that you think may be related to this change please file a bug or post on discourse to bring it to our attention.

Get involved!

If you’d like to be like Dave, and contribute to Firefox development, take a look at codetribute.mozilla.org. Whether you’re interested in automation and tools, the Firefox frontend, the Javascript engine, or many other things, there’s an opportunity waiting just for you!

Greetings extension developers!

We wanted to highlight this just-published blog post from our AI team where they share some exciting news – we’re shipping a new experimental ML API in Firefox that will allow developers to leverage our AI Runtime to run offline machine learning tasks in their web extensions.

Head on over to Mozilla’s AI blog to learn more. After you’ve had a chance to check it out, we encourage you to share feedback, comments, or questions over on the Mozilla AI Discord (invite link).

Happy coding!

The post Announcing the WebExtensions ML API appeared first on Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog.