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Firefox krijgt eindelijk veelgevraagde feature die Chrome en Edge al langer hadden  clickx.be

Tabs pile up fast on mobile. Imagine you’re planning a summer barbecue, and you start by searching for the best rib recipe. Twenty minutes later, you’re 17 tabs deep: comparing marinades, debating side dishes, checking the weather, making a grocery list and adding songs to a playlist.

None of those tabs are organized. They’re mixed in with everything else you’ve been browsing, making it hard to keep track of what you’re saving for later.

Now you can group related tabs in Firefox for Android, keeping them together in labeled, colored groups so you can actually find what you need when you need it.

How it works

Drag one tab onto another, or select a few and tap “Add to group.” Name it, pick a color, and you’re done.

Each group appears as a single card in the tab tray rather than a dozen separate tabs. You can open it, rename it, recolor it, or delete it whenever you want. Search still finds tabs inside a group, too.

So when you’re standing in the produce aisle looking for that rib recipe, you won’t have to scroll past dozens of unrelated tabs just to find it. Everything for your barbecue is organized together in one place, ready when you need it.

Finally sorted, as it should be

Tab grouping was the most requested feature from Firefox mobile users in 2025. And we get it: your tabs shouldn’t get harder to manage the more you use your browser. Download the latest version of Firefox for Android now to try Tab Groups, with iOS support on the way. 

The post Your Android tabs just got a lot more organized with Firefox appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

You’re planning a trip. Reading an article. Following a recipe.

Then a question pops into your head. Sometimes it leads down a rabbit hole – with more searches, more tabs and plenty to explore. Other times, you just need a little context so you can get back to what you were doing.

That’s why we’re introducing Quick Answers for Firefox on iOS.

With Quick Answers, you can ask a question using your voice and get a concise answer. Just open a new tab, long-press the voice button and ask.

For example:

• “What does mellifluous mean?”
• “What is 95 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius?”
• “What’s the difference between suede and nubuck?”

If a quick answer is all you need, you’re done.

If you want to dig in deeper, the links to supporting sources are there for exploration.

Built with transparency and privacy in mind

We’ve built Quick Answers to be transparent about how it works and what data is shared.

Voice is processed on your device using Apple’s speech recognition technology. No raw audio is stored or sent to the server, and Firefox doesn’t share your browsing history or personal context with the AI model. Only the transcribed text of your question is sent to generate an answer. You can turn the feature off at any time in Settings → AI Controls.

Quick Answers is starting to roll out today to Firefox for iOS users in the U.S. using English.

Oh, and if you’re wondering…

• Mellifluous means pleasant and musical to hear.
• 95 degrees Fahrenheit is 35 degrees Celsius.
• Suede is made from the underside of the hide, while nubuck is made from the outer side and buffed to create a soft, velvety texture.

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The post Quick Answers: For the questions in between appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Today, we’re excited to announce the Preview of Containers in Firefox version 153, which lets you keep separate parts of your online life (work, shopping, personal, banking) logged into different accounts in the same browser window, but keeps your cookies and ad tracking isolated inside each container.

This means that stuff you do in one container isn’t seen by other containers. No longer will you search for a new hat to wear to a party, only to be inundated with ads for hats at every twist and turn on the internet for weeks to come.

For almost a decade, many of you have relied on our Multi-Account Containers extension to keep work, personal, and privacy-sensitive browsing separate without needing multiple browsers or profiles. 

We’ve heard your feedback and understood the value you find in that separation. Now, we’re bringing the power of the Multi-Account Containers extension directly into the heart of Firefox for all to benefit from.

Why bring Containers into Firefox?

Whether you’re managing multiple social media accounts, separating work projects from personal shopping, or simply keeping your banking activity distinct, Containers are designed to help you organize your digital space. By making Containers a native, first-party feature in Firefox 153, we are:

• Making it visible by default: You no longer need to hunt for an add-on to get started. Containers are built right into your browser, ready to help you manage your context from day one.
• Simplifying your workflow: We’ve focused on making it easier to open, create, and manage your containers from the places you already browse.
• Preserving what you love: For our long-time users who have relied on the add-on, the native experience is designed to maintain the core functionality, flexibility, and visual identity you depend on.
• Driving continued investment into the future of this feature, ensuring it lives on as a first party citizen of Firefox.

What to expect in the Preview

In this preview release, you can:

• Open tabs in specific containers: Keep your browsing activity isolated by context.
• Customize your workspace: Create and manage containers with your own names, colors, and icons.
• Manage settings easily: Control your container setup directly from the Firefox settings surface.
• Get Started: Right-click any tab or long-press the new tab (+) button to open a container tab — or head to Firefox Settings to create your first container.

If you’re already using the Multi-Account Containers, there’s nothing special you need to do. Not all of the features of the add-on are available in the first-party version of containers just yet, we’re still building them out.  You can continue to use the add-on alongside the built in containers, no need to uninstall the add-on.

This release represents our first step in making Firefox more adaptable to how you actually live and work online. While this is just the beginning, we have plans to refine this experience and build a foundation for future features that make context separation even more seamless.

Join the Conversation

We’re eager to hear how this native experience fits into your daily routine. As you explore the new Containers Preview in Firefox 153, please let us know what you think by posting your feedback in this Mozilla Connect thread. Your feedback helps us shape the future of these tools and ensures we’re building features that truly matter to you.

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The post Experience Better Browsing: Introducing Native Containers in Firefox 153 appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Mozilla: Microsoft stuurt gebruikers nog steeds richting Edge  ictmagazine.nl

Mozilla: ‘Microsoft blijft gebruikers richting Edge sturen’  ITdaily

Chrome 150 en Firefox 152 zijn uit: kritieke lekken gedicht  Softonic.nl

Two years ago Mozilla asked two leading experts on deceptive design, Dr. Harry Brignull and Cennydd Bowles, to look at how Microsoft was treating people who tried to use a different browser on Windows. Their report, Over The Edge, documented a pattern of design choices in Windows, Edge, and Bing that nudged, pressured, and at times tricked people into using Edge.

This morning, the same researchers are publishing Over The Edge 2.0. They retested the same questions across Windows 10 and Windows 11, and added two new dimensions. First, how does Microsoft’s approach change from one jurisdiction to another? They assessed Microsoft’s tactics across four regions: the USA, India, the UK, and Germany, as a representative country in the European Economic Area. Second, they examined how AI features, specifically Copilot, are being used to shape the same outcomes the original report identified.

Their conclusion is short. Microsoft still does not allow users to download, set as the default, or keep using alternative browsers without harmful interference. The patterns are documented, and they meet established definitions of coercion, deception, and manipulation.

There is one bright spot. In Europe, where the Digital Markets Act applies, some harmful design tactics are gone. The Bing ‘All you need is right here’ panel and its trick wording. The nagging Windows 10 ‘You’re almost done setting up your PC’ journey. The Copilot data toggles that default to “On” in the US and India, by contrast default to “Off” in the EEA and the UK. Same Windows. Same Edge. Same Copilot. Different design choices, because the law required them.

That is the heart of the report. Although the EEA product still has obvious harmful design patterns, Microsoft has built a fairer user experience for browser choice. It has shipped that experience to one region. Everywhere else, including the US, the UK, India, and Brazil, harmful design patterns continue. This is an active choice – and one that can be made differently.  

The findings are the researchers’ own. Mozilla commissioned the work, and the report discloses that role, but the methodology, the screenshots, and the public journey database at edge.brignull.com let anyone check the evidence for themselves.

We make Firefox because we believe the web should serve people, not platforms. Firefox is independent, built by Mozilla, and designed around what is best for users, not what increases lock-in. 

Read the full report here.

The post Over The Edge 2.0: what independent researchers found about browser choice on Windows appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Open source AI has crossed a threshold. For years the debate has centered around whether open models could ever compete with closed ones. This is no longer a debate we should be having. Today Mozilla is publishing its inaugural State of Open Source AI report, built on new analysis and a global survey of 950+ developers, showing that open models are no longer playing catch-up. The performance gap with top proprietary systems like ChatGPT and Claude has narrowed to just 3%, while costs have fallen up to 50x in three years.

But the report also surfaces a harder truth. Open models now power roughly a third of real-world AI usage, but capture only 4% of the revenue. So while the value is there, it just isn’t flowing back into the open ecosystem that made it possible. Meanwhile, the geopolitical picture is shifting fast.

Asia is racing ahead

China and East Asia now lead the world in open source AI adoption, at 89%, far ahead of the West, treating open source as a cornerstone of national strategy. Governments elsewhere are responding, with 12 new national AI strategies launched last year, and 47 countries now restrict foreign processing for critical workloads. The EU, Canada, and India are backing open ecosystems with real public investment, treating AI infrastructure as a strategic asset.

Developers want open models, but they can’t always ship them.

For developers, the appetite for open source is there, and cost and privacy rank as developers’ top reasons for choosing models. But wanting to use open models and running them in production are different things. 79% of developers use open models, yet only 51% have deployed them in production, versus 63% for closed models.

As Álvaro Ruiz Cubero of SlashData, which fielded the survey for Mozilla, put it: “this gap indicates that there is not an issue purely of model quality, but of missing infrastructure. Deployment rates for open models barely increase with company size, highlighting a lack of mature tooling and support. At the same time, buyers are prioritising licensing terms (31%) and ownership (26%), signalling a clear shift toward control and flexibility over raw capability.”

The real battle has moved beyond the model

Perhaps the most important finding may be the least obvious. The layer that matters most isn’t the model. It’s the agentic harness: the software between people and models that decides what an AI system can see, remember, and do. Changing the surrounding software can affect performance more than switching the model itself. Whoever controls that layer controls how AI behaves in the world.

Right now, that layer is being built with very few guardrails. Users approve AI agent requests by default up to 93% of the time, with so-called “consent fatigue” going largely unnoticed.

“Open source AI has reached a turning point,” said Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla’s Chief Technology Officer. “It’s no longer about expanding access to models; it’s about who has the power to shape, audit, and improve them. Without investment in the infrastructure, tooling, and governance around open models, we risk locking in a system where only restrictive, closed AI can scale – and that doesn’t serve the public interest, or sovereignty over tech policy decisions.”

Be owners, not renters

Open models offer what a subscription never can: owning your infrastructure instead of renting someone else’s. Companies like Microsoft and Uber are already rethinking their reliance on paid, closed AI tools as the bills add up. The economics are shifting and so is the thinking. 

If you’re a CTO, a policymaker, a developer or an investor, this is the report for you. Read it, share it, and help build the infrastructure to make openness usable, not just possible.

Read the full Mozilla State of Open Source AI report here. 

The post Mozilla’s Inaugural ‘State of Open Source AI’ Report Is Here appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Firefox gaat tweewekelijks releases uitbrengen  ictmagazine.nl

Firefox krijgt dubbel zoveel nieuwe versies  Tweakers

We’ve all been there. You update a small piece of text or fix a tiny CSS bug. You push the code, and then… you wait. Your CI pipeline decides that this minor tweak means it needs to run your entire end-to-end regression suite.

It’s slow, it’s expensive, and honestly, it’s a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

If you tuned into Selenium Conference this year, you might have caught Simon Stewart’s talk. He hit on a topic that every team struggling with slow deployments needs to hear: we need to stop running things just because they are there.

The latest version of PerfCompare is now live!

Check out the change-log below to see the updates:

[andra - esanuandra ]

• PCF-391 The keyboard handling for the revision dropdown should be done differently (#926)

[david - davidmiculit ]

• Bug 2040649 - Remove Raptor framework from PerfCompare (#1042)

[kala - kala-moz ]

• Results Page: Return the scatter series for base and new back to original order (#1046)

• Bug: 2044194 Port client-side KDE mode detection from kde-widget into CommonGraph (#1045)

• Bug 2034263: Give subtest column in subtest page a max-width (#1047)

[paul - padenot]

• Two small followups on modal-work (#1049)

• Assorted fixes to improve the app when numbers are very large and not measuring time. (#1050)

Thank you for the contributions!

Bugs or feature requests can be filed on Bugzilla. The team can also be found on the #perfcompare channel on Element. Come and chat!

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WebDriver is a remote control interface that enables introspection and control of user agents. As such, it can help developers to verify that their websites are working and performing well with all major browsers. The protocol is standardized by the W3C and consists of two separate specifications: WebDriver classic (HTTP) and the new WebDriver BiDi (Bi-Directional).

This newsletter gives an overview of the work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 152 release cycle.

Contributions

Firefox is an open source project, and we are always happy to receive external code contributions to our WebDriver implementation. We want to give special thanks to everyone who filed issues, bugs and submitted patches.

In Firefox 152, multiple WebDriver bugs were fixed by contributors:

• Khalid AlHaddad extended the webExtension.install command to support installing web extensions enabled in Private Browsing mode.
• Sameem improved the Marionette and WebDriver BiDi screenshot commands to enforce maximum allowed dimensions.
• Amin Amir fixed a bug in browsingContext.sys.mjs where a private field was incorrectly assigned without the # prefix.

WebDriver code is written in JavaScript, Python, and Rust so any web developer can contribute! Read how to setup the work environment and check the list of mentored issues for Marionette, or the list of mentored JavaScript bugs for WebDriver BiDi. Join our chatroom if you need any help to get started!

General

• Improved the Marionette and WebDriver BiDi screenshot commands to enforce maximum allowed dimensions.

WebDriver BiDi

• Extended the webExtension.install command to support installing web extensions in Firefox enabled in Private Browsing mode.
• Improved the browser.setDownloadBehavior command to allow overriding the download target folder before the temporary file is created.
• Fixed network events to only forward in-memory cached JavaScript responses when there is a matching network event collector, avoiding unnecessary data forwarding.

Marionette

• Improved the WebDriver:Navigate and WebDriver:Refresh commands to properly report errors when triggering the navigation fails, instead of silently ignoring them.

The latest version of the Firefox Profiler is now live! Check out the full changelog below to see what’s changed:

Highlights:

• [Nazım Can Altınova] Add source map symbolication and source view support (#6018)
  • It requires Firefox changes that will land in Firefox 154, but after these changes, you will be able to see the source mapped function names as well as the source contents!
• [fatadel] Upgrade to React 19 (#6067)
• [fatadel] Drive counter tooltips from a tooltipRows schema (#6023)
• [Markus Stange] Support reading profiles from JsonSlabs files (#6037)
• [fatadel] Replace the footer-links overlay with a settings menu (#6042)

Other Changes:

• [Nazım Can Altınova] Fix call node context menu being hidden behind source view bottom box (#6045)
• [Nazım Can Altınova] Pass --use-env-proxy only when the node version is >= 24 (#6064)
• [fatadel] Upgrade @firefox-devtools/react-contextmenu to 5.2.4 (#6066)
• [Markus Stange] Switch profiler-edit from minimist to commander (#6065)
• [Florian Quèze] Don’t fail profile processing when a marker’s stack field is not a backtrace (#6069)
• [fatadel] Remove unused undici-types package (#6074)
• [cathaysia] Update isLocalURL to include LAN addresses, .local domains, and hostn… (#5973)
• [Markus Stange] Fix from-url with binary profiles (#6072)
• [Markus Stange] Add an insertStackLabels helper. (#6076)
• [fatadel] Add TrackPower–tooltip-average-power-microwatt (#6080)
• [Markus Stange] Downgrade to React 19.1 to fix unusable dev build performance. (#6082)
• [spokodev] fix(FilterNavigatorBar): clip overflow so many breadcrumbs do not expand the parent (#6085)
• [Markus Stange] Move paddings inside the tree header cells. (#6002)
• [Markus Stange] Add an --insert-label-frames argument to the profiler-edit tool (#5966)
• [Markus Stange] Stop printing “error: too many arguments” during tests. (#6088)
• [Markus Stange] More additions to profiler-edit, for sp3 profiles (#6009)
• [Nazım Can Altınova] Do not rely on localized texts in the settings menu tests (#6101)

Big thanks to our amazing localizers for making this release possible:

• be: Andrei Mukamolau
• de: Ger
• de: Michael Köhler
• de: Ralf Duehnfahr
• el: Jim Spentzos
• en-CA: chutten
• en-GB: Ian Neal
• es-CL: ravmn
• fr: Théo Chevalier
• fr: wy
• fur: Fabio Tomat
• fy-NL: Fjoerfoks
• ia: Melo46
• it: Francesco Lodolo [:flod]
• nl: Mark Heijl
• ru: Valery Ledovskoy
• sr: Марко Костић (Marko Kostić)
• sv-SE: Andreas Pettersson
• tr: Grk
• tr: Selim Şumlu
• zh-CN: Olvcpr423
• zh-TW: Pin-guang Chen

Find out more about the Firefox Profiler on profiler.firefox.com! If you have any questions, join the discussion on our Matrix channel!

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Firefox gives you many ways to make the browser your own, from privacy settings and AI controls to tab management, custom colors, and more. As we continue to improve Firefox, you get more control over how it works for you.

Today, we’re introducing a redesigned settings experience that makes your options easier to find, understand, and manage.

Over time, some settings pages became crowded, related preferences were spread across different sections, and it wasn’t always obvious where to look for a particular option. The redesign makes settings easier to navigate while preserving existing preferences and the flexibility and control that Firefox is known for.

The passwords and autofill sections, before (left) and after (right) the redesign.

The new settings feature a cleaner layout, modern visual design, improved labels and descriptions, and updated navigation, bringing related categories together. One of the most noticeable updates is the retirement of the long-standing “General” page. Many of the options that were previously there have now moved into more specific areas, including “Appearance,” “Accessibility,” “Languages,” and “Tabs and browsing.”

The redesigned settings include dedicated pages for languages and other categories.

Some options may have moved, but your existing preferences haven’t changed. The customization options you rely on are still available. If you’re not sure where to find something, the search bar can help you locate it quickly. You can also visit Mozilla Support for more detailed guidance.  

This redesign reflects extensive user research, including interviews, usability testing, card-sorting exercises, and analysis of usage data. It was also shaped by feedback from the Firefox community through Mozilla Connect, Reddit, and other channels, along with collaboration across Mozilla teams.

Thank you to everyone who shared their feedback along the way. Your insights helped shape the redesigned settings experience, and they’ll continue to guide future improvements as Firefox evolves.

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The post Firefox is easier than ever to customize appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Firefox has been busy introducing updates across productivity, privacy and AI. From Project Nova and browser-wide AI controls to expanded privacy protections and new ways to stay organized, the goal is simple: help you spend less time managing your browser and more time getting things done online.

But building the best browser isn’t just about shipping new features. It’s also about building them alongside the people who use Firefox every day. 

Introducing the Firefox roadmap

Today, we’re introducing the Firefox roadmap to give people a closer look at what we’re building and a preview of where Firefox is heading next.

We’ve always built Firefox in the open and our new roadmap is an extension of that. 

“Some of the best ideas in Firefox come directly from the people who use it,” said Ajit Varma, head of Firefox. “The roadmap gives our community a new way to see what’s taking shape, share feedback earlier and help guide where we’re heading next.”

The roadmap highlights what we’re working on across Firefox, including productivity, privacy, performance, AI and the technologies that help make the web better for everyone. 

Some items on the roadmap will be things we’ve already shared; others we’ll be sharing publicly for the first time. Together, it’ll provide a clearer picture of where Firefox is headed and the areas we’re investing in to build a better browser. 

Here’s a look at what’s rolling out now in Firefox 152, and what we’re building next.

New in Firefox 152

• Tab Groups are now on Android: When “just a few” turns into dozens of tabs, it’s hard to tell what’s important or which tab had the thing you were actually looking for. Tab Groups have been helping Firefox desktop users bring order to the chaos. Now, they’re starting to roll out on Firefox for Android, turning related mobile tabs into clear threads you can name, color and come back to when you’re ready. iOS support will follow later this year.
• Simpler way to manage Firefox settings: We’ve redesigned Firefox settings to make it easier to find what you’re looking for, discover controls you might not have known existed, and truly make Firefox your own. Don’t worry: Your existing preferences aren’t changing; just better organized. Get the details here and visit Mozilla Support for answers to all your settings questions.
• Privacy protections you can actually see: You shouldn’t have to worry about trackers every time you browse. Firefox blocks many of them automatically so you can focus on what you came to do. The new Blocked Tracker Widget brings that protection into view, showing how many trackers Firefox has blocked over time, what kinds of tracking activity it stopped and how Firefox is working behind the scenes.

What’s next on the Firefox roadmap

• Power users know that even small efficiency improvements add up over time. One of Firefox’s most requested customization features, customizable keyboard shortcuts give you more control over how Firefox fits into your workflow, whether you’re streamlining a routine task, adapting Firefox to your accessibility needs or simply prefer your own shortcuts.
• Designed to help people handle everyday PDF tasks without leaving the browser, upcoming PDF editing improvements will include the ability to split, merge and reorganize documents directly in Firefox. 
• Multi-Account Containers, one of Firefox’s most-loved browser extensions, helps people carve out a separate space for each part of their online life and keep work, personal and other online activities from bleeding into one another. We’re now bringing Containers into the native Firefox experience, so more people can take advantage of one of Firefox’s most distinctive tools without needing to install an add-on first.
• Firefox’s free built-in VPN is coming to mobile devices, helping people stay protected across more of the devices they use every day. Whether you’re traveling, connecting from public Wi-Fi or simply browsing away from home, bringing VPN to mobile is part of a broader effort to make Firefox privacy protections available wherever you go.
• Sometimes the fastest way to get information is simply to ask. With Quick Answers, people will be able to ask Firefox a question using their voice and receive a concise AI-generated answer right in the browser, with sources available when they want to learn more.
• We’re continuing to build Smart Window, our optional and private AI browsing experience designed to help people get answers, compare information and make sense of what they’re already reading online. You can now try it without joining a waitlist. 
• We’re adding Power Saving Mode to help identify tabs that consume the most resources on your phone and automatically reduce their impact, extending battery life without constantly managing what’s running in the background.

Join the conversation

Try out the latest features, explore what’s coming next and tell us what you think on Mozilla Connect. 

We’re also hosting a Reddit AMA on June 24 with Firefox product leaders, so bring your questions. 

Talk soon.

Take control of your internet Download Firefox

The post What’s new in Firefox this June, and what’s next on the Firefox roadmap appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

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 content into a 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

P.S.

Enjoyed these updates? Subscribe to the Mozilla Community Newsletter and get the latest updates delivered straight to your inbox.

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.

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.