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Mozilla gaat bedrijven betaalde ondersteuning bieden  Tweakers

Increasingly, businesses, schools, and government institutions deploy Firefox at scale for security, resilience, and data sovereignty. Organizations have fine-grained administrative and orchestration control of the browser’s behavior using policies with Firefox and the Extended Support Release (ESR). Today, we’re opening early access to Firefox Support for Organizations, a new program that begins operation in January 2026.

What Firefox Support for Organizations offers

Support for Organizations is a dedicated offering for teams who need private issue triage and escalation, defined response times, custom development options, and close collaboration with Mozilla’s engineering and product teams.

• Private support channel: Access a dedicated support system where you can open private help tickets directly with expert support engineers. Issues are triaged by severity level, with defined response times and clear escalation paths to ensure timely resolution.
  
• Discounts on custom development: Paid support customers get discounts on custom development work for integration projects, compatibility testing, or environment-specific needs. With custom development as a paid add-on to support plans, Firefox can adapt with your infrastructure and third-party updates.
  
• Strategic collaboration: Gain early insight into upcoming development and help shape the Firefox Enterprise roadmap through direct collaboration with Mozilla’s team.

Support for Organizations adds a new layer of help for teams and businesses that need confidential, reliable, and customized levels of support. All Firefox users will continue to have full access to existing public resources including documentation, the knowledge base, and community forums, and we’ll keep improving those for everyone in future. Support plans will help us better serve users who rely on Firefox for business-critical and sensitive operations.

Get in touch for early access

If these levels of support are interesting for your organization, get in touch using our inquiry form and we’ll get back to you with more information.

Firefox Support for Organizations Get early access

The post Introducing early access for Firefox Support for Organizations appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Background

Mozilla launched Tab Grouping in early 2025, allowing tabs to be arranged and grouped with persistent labels. It was the most requested feature in the history of Mozilla Connect. While tab grouping provides a great way to manage tabs and reduce tab overload, it can be a challenge to locate which tabs to group when you have many open.

We sought to improve the workflows by providing an AI tab grouping feature that enables two key capabilities:

• Suggesting a title for a tab group when it is created by the user.
• Suggesting tabs from the current window to be added to a tab group.

Of course, we wanted this to work without you needing to send any data of yours to Mozilla, so we used our local Firefox AI runtime and built an efficient model that delivers the features entirely on your own device. The feature is opt-in and downloads two small ML models when the user clicks to run it the first time.

Group title suggestion Understanding the problem

Suggesting titles for grouped tabs is a challenge because it is hard to understand user intent when tabs are first grouped. Based on our interviews when we started the project, we found that while tab groups are sometimes generic terms like ‘Shopping’ or ‘Travel’, over half the time users’ tabs were specific terms such as name of a video game, friend or town. We also found tab names to be extremely short – 1 or 2 words.

Generating a digest of the group

To address these challenges, we adopt a hybrid methodology that combines a modified TF-IDF–based textual analysis with keyword extraction. We identify terms that are statistically distinctive to the titles of pages within a tab group compared to those outside it. The three most prominent keywords, along with the full titles of three randomly selected pages, are then combined to produce a concise digest representing the group, which is used as input for the subsequent stage of processing using a language model.

Generating the label

The digest string is used as an input to a generative model that returns the final label. We used a T5 based encoder-decoder model (flan-t5-base) that was fine tuned on over 10,000 example situations and labels.  

One of the key challenges in developing the model was generating the training data samples to tune the model without any user data. To do this, we defined a set of user archetypes and used an LLM API (OpenAI GPT-4) to create sample pages for a user performing various tasks. This was augmented by real page titles from the publicly available common crawl dataset. We then used the LLM to suggest short titles for those use cases. The process was first done at a small scale of several hundred group names. These were manually corrected and curated, adjusting for brevity and consistency. As the process scaled up, the initial 300 group names were used as examples passed to the LLM so that the additional examples created would meet those standards.  

Shrinking things down

We need to get the model small enough to run on most computers. Once the initial model was trained, it was sampled to a smaller model using a process known as knowledge distillation. For distillation, we tuned a t5-efficient-tiny model from the token probability outputs of our teacher flan-t5-base model.  Midway through the distillation process we also removed two encoder transformer layers and two decoder layers to further reduce the number of parameters.

Finally, the model parameters were quantized from floating point (4 bytes per parameter) to integer 8 bit. In the end this entire reduction process reduced the model from 1GB to 57 MB, with only a modest reduction in accuracy. 

Suggesting tabs  Understanding the problem

For tab suggestions, we identified a couple of approaches on how people prefer grouping their tabs. Some people prefer grouping by domain to easily access all documents for work for instance. Others might prefer grouping all their tabs together when they are planning a trip. Others still might prefer separating their “work” and “personal” tabs.

Our initial approach on suggesting tabs was based on semantic similarity. Tabs that are topically similar are suggested.

Identifying topically similar tabs

We first convert tab titles to a feature vector locally using a MiniLM embedding model. Embedding models are trained so that similar content produces vectors that are close together in embedding space. Using a similarity measure such as cosine similarity, we’re able to assign how closely similar a tab title or url is to another.

The similarity score between an anchor tab chosen by the user and another tab is a linear combination of the candidate tab with the group title (if present) of the anchor tab, the anchor tab title and the anchor url. Using these values, we generate a similarity probability and tabs that have a high probability threshold are suggested to be part of the group.

where,
w is the weight,
t_i is the candidate tab,
t_a is the anchor tab,
g_a is the anchor group title,
u_i is the candidate url
u_a is the anchor url, and,
σ is the sigmoid function

Optimizing the weights

In order to find the weights, we framed the problem as a classification task, where we calculate the precision and recall based on the tabs that were correctly classified given an anchor tab. We used synthetic data generated by OpenAI based on the user archetypes above.

We initially used a clustering approach to establish a baseline and switched to a logistic regression when we realized that treating the group, title and url features with varying importances improved our metrics.

Using logistic regression, there was an 18% improvement against the baseline.

Performance

While the median number of tabs for people using the feature is relatively small (~25), there are some “power” users whose tab count reaches the thousands. This would cause the tab grouping feature to take uncomfortably long. 

This was part of the reason why we switched from a clustering based approach to a linear model. 

Using our performance framework, we found that the p99 of running logistic regression compared to a clustering based method such as KMeans improved by 33%.

Future work here would involve improving F1 score. These could be by adding a time-related component as part of the inference (we are more likely to group tabs together that we’ve opened at the same time) or using a fine-tuned embedding model for our use case.

Thanks for reading

All of our work is open source. If you are a developer feel free to peruse our source code on our model training, or view our topic model on Huggingface.

Feel free to try the feature and let us know what you think!

Take control of your internet Download Firefox

The post Under the hood: How Firefox suggests tab groups with local AI appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Software-update: Mozilla Firefox 144.0.2 - Computer - Downloads  Tweakers

Firefox gaat antwoorden op zoekopdrachten in adresbalk tonen  Tweakers

We’re working on a new feature to display direct results in your address bar as you type, so that you can skip the results page and get to the right site or answer faster.

Every major browser today supports a feature known as “search suggestions.” As you type in the address bar, your chosen search engine offers real-time suggestions for searches you might want to perform.

This is a helpful feature, but these suggestions always take you to a search engine results page, not necessarily the information or website you’re ultimately looking for. This is ideal for the search provider, but not always best for the user.

For example, flight status summaries on a search results page are convenient, but it would be more convenient to show that information directly in the address bar:

Similarly, people commonly search for a website when they don’t know or remember the exact URL. Why not skip the search?

Another common use case is searching for recommendations, where Firefox can show highly relevant results from sources around the web:

The truth is, browser address bars today are largely a conduit to your search engine. And while search engines are very useful, a single and centralized source for finding everything online is not how we want the web to work. Firefox is proudly independent, and our address bar should be too.

We experimented with the concept several years ago, but didn’t ship it1 because we have an extremely high standard for privacy and weren’t satisfied with any design that would send your raw queries directly to us. Even though these are already sent to your search engine, Firefox is built on the principle that even Mozilla should not be able to learn what you do online. Unlike most search engines, we don’t want to know who’s searching for what, and we want to enable anyone in the world to verify that we couldn’t know even if we tried.

We now have the technical architecture to meet that bar. When Firefox requests suggestions, it encrypts your query using a new protocol we helped design called Oblivious HTTP. The encrypted request goes to a relay operated by Fastly, which can see your IP address but not the text. Mozilla can see the text, but not who it came from. We can then return a result directly or fetch one from a specialized search service. No single party can connect what you type to who you are.

Firefox will continue to show traditional search suggestions for all queries and add direct results only when we have high confidence they match your intent. As with search engines, some of these results may be sponsored to support Firefox, but only if they’re highly relevant, and neither we nor the sponsor will know who they’re for. We expect this to be useful to users and, hopefully, help level the playing field by allowing Mozilla to work directly with independent sites rather than mediating all web discovery through the search engine.

Running this at scale is not trivial. We need the capacity to handle the volume and servers close to people to avoid introducing noticeable latency. To keep things smooth, we are starting in the United States and will evaluate expanding into other geographies as we learn from this experience and observe how the system performs. The feature is still in development and testing and will roll out gradually over the coming year.2

1 We did ship an experimental version that users could enable in settings, as well as a small set of locally-matched suggestions in some regions. Unfortunately, the former had too little reach to be worth building features for, and the latter had very poor relevance and utility due to the technical limitations (most notably, the size of the local database).

2 Where the feature is available, you can disable it by unchecking “Retrieve suggestions as you type” in the “Search” pane in Firefox settings. If this box is not yet available in your version of Firefox, you can pre-emptively disable it by setting browser.urlbar.quicksuggest.online.enabled to false in about:config.

Take control of your internet Download Firefox

The post Better search suggestions in Firefox appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Mozilla verplicht transparantie over dataverzameling  Techzine.nl

Hello again from the Thunderbird development team! As autumn settles in, we’re balancing the steady pace of ongoing projects with some forward-looking planning for 2026. Alongside coding and testing, some of our recent attention has gone into budgets, roadmaps, and setting priorities for the year ahead. It’s not the most glamorous work, but it’s essential for keeping our momentum strong and ensuring that the big features we’re building today continue to deliver value well into the future. In the meantime, plenty of exciting progress has landed across the application, and here are some of the highlights.

Exchange support for email is here

Exchange support has officially landed in Thunderbird 144, which will roll out as our October monthly release. A big final push from the team saw a number of important features make it in before the merge:

• Undo/Redo operations for move/copy/delete
• Notifications
• Basic Search
• Folder Repair
• Remote message content display & blocking
• Status Bar feedback messaging
• Account Settings screen changes
• Autosync manager for message downloads
• Attachment delete & detach
• First set of advanced server settings
• Experimental tenant-specific configuration options (behind a preference) now being tested with early adopters

The QA team is continuing to work through their test plans with support from a small beta test group, and their findings will guide the documentation and support we share more broadly with users on monthly release 144, as well as the priorities to tackle before we head into the next chapter.

Looking ahead, the team is already focused on:

• Expanding advanced server settings for more complex environments
• Improving search functionality
• Folder Quotas & Subscriptions
• Refining the user experience as more real-world feedback comes in
• A planning session to scope work to support calendar and address book via EWS

Keep track of feature delivery here.

Conversation View Work Week

One of the biggest milestones this month was our dedicated Conversation View Work Week which recently wrapped up, where designers and engineers gathered in person to tackle one of Thunderbird’s most anticipated UX features. 

The team aligned early on goals and scope, rapidly iterated on wireframes and high-fidelity mockups, and built out initial front-end components powered by the new Panorama database. 

By the end of the week, we had working prototypes that collapsed threads into a Gmail-style conversation view, demonstrated the new LiveView architecture, and produced detailed design documentation. It was an intense but rewarding sprint that laid the foundation for a more modern and intuitive Thunderbird experience.

Account Hub

We’ve now added the ability to manually edit an EWS configuration, as well as allow for users to create an advanced EWS configuration through the manual configuration step

The ability to cancel any loading operation in account hub for email has been completed and will be added to daily shortly

• This also had the side effect of users who click “Stop” in the account old setup with an OAuth window open now closing the OAuth window automatically
• We will be uplifting this change to beta and then ESR

Progress is being made with adding a step for 3rd party hosting credentials confirmation, with the UI complete and the logic being worked on

• This progress will have to take into account changes from the cancel loading patch, as there are conflicting changes
• Once this feature is complete, it will be uplifted to beta, and then ESR

Work will soon be starting to enable the creation of address books through account hub by default.

Follow progress in the Meta Bug

Calendar UI Rebuild

After a long pause, work on the Calendar re-write has resumed! We’ve picked things back up by continuing focus on the event read dialog. A number of improvements have already landed, including proper handling of description data and several small bug fixes.

We have seven patches under review that cover key areas such as:

• Accessibility improvements, including proper announcements of event and calendar titles.
• Adding the footer for acceptance.
• Updating displays and transitioning current work to use the mod-src protocol.
• Handling resizing

Development is also underway to add attendee support, after which we’ll move on to polishing the remaining pieces of the read dialog UI.

Maintenance, Recent Features and Fixes

August was set aside as a focus for maintenance, with a good number of our team dedicated to handling upstream liabilities such as our continued l10n migration to Fluent and module loading changes. In addition to these items, we’ve had help from the development community to deliver a variety of improvements over the past month:

• Tree restyling following upstream changes – solved
• An 18 year old bug to enable event duplication via drag & drop – solved
• A 15 year old bug to sort by unread in threads correctly – solved
• Implementation of standard colours throughout the application. [meta bug]
• Modernization of module inclusion. [meta bug]
• and many more which are listed in release notes for beta.

If you would like to see new features as they land, and help us squash some early bugs, you can try running daily and check the pushlog to see what has recently landed. This assistance is immensely helpful for catching problems early.

—

Toby Pilling

Senior Manager, Desktop Engineering

The post Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: August 2025 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Updated September 24th, 2025 17:34:38 UTC - Socket has also published their own accompanying blog post about the attack.

Summary

On September 24th, the crates.io team was notified by Kirill Boychenko from the Socket Threat Research Team of two malicious crates which were actively searching file contents for Etherum private keys, Solana private keys, and arbitrary byte arrays for exfiltration.

These crates were:

• faster_log - Published on May 25th, 2025, downloaded 7181 times
• async_println - Published on May 25th, 2025, downloaded 1243 times

The malicious code was executed at runtime, when running or testing a project depending on them. Notably, they did not execute any malicious code at build time. Except for their malicious payload, these crates copied the source code, features, and documentation of legitimate crates, using a similar name to them (a case of typosquatting1).

Actions taken

The users in question were immediately disabled, and the crates in question were deleted2 from crates.io shortly after. We have retained copies of all logs associated with the users and the malicious crate files for further analysis.

The deletion was performed at 15:34 UTC on September 24, 2025.

Analysis

Both crates were copies of a crate which provided logging functionality, and the logging implementation remained functional in the malicious crates. The original crate had a feature which performed log file packing, which iterated over an associated directories files.

The attacker inserted code to perform the malicious action during a log packing operation, which searched the log files being processed from that directory for:

• Quoted Ethereum private keys (0x + 64 hex)
• Solana-style Base58 secrets
• Bracketed byte arrays

The crates then proceeded to exfiltrate the results of this search to https://mainnet[.]solana-rpc-pool[.]workers[.]dev/.

These crates had no dependent downstream crates on crates.io.

The malicious users associated with these crates had no other crates or publishes, and the team is actively investigating associative actions in our retained3 logs.

Thanks

Our thanks to Kirill Boychenko from the Socket Threat Research Team for reporting the crates. We also want to thank Carol Nichols from the crates.io team, Pietro Albini from the Rust Security Response WG and Walter Pearce from the Rust Foundation for aiding in the response.

1. typosquatting is a technique used by bad actors to initiate dependency confusion attacks where a legitimate user might be tricked into using a malicious dependency instead of their intended dependency — for example, a bad actor might try to publish a crate at proc-macro3 to catch users of the legitimate proc-macro2 crate. ↩

2. The crates were preserved for future analysis should there be other attacks, and to inform scanning efforts in the future. ↩

3. One year of logs are retained on crates.io, but only 30 days are immediately available on our log platform. We chose not to go further back in our analysis, since IP address based analysis is limited by the use of dynamic IP addresses in the wild, and the relevant IP address being part of an allocation to a residential ISP. ↩

We’re back with our twelfth episode of the State of the Thunder! In this episode, we’re talking about community initiatives, filling you in on Android development, and finishing our updates on popular Mozilla Connect requests.

Want to find out how to join future State of the Thunders? Be sure to join our Thunderbird planning mailing list for all the details.

Austin RiverHacks and Ask-A Fox

Thunderbird is a Silver sponsor for Austin RiverHacks NASA Space Apps Challenge 2025! If you’re in or around Austin, Texas from October 4th-5th, and want to join an in-person event where curious minds delve into NASA data to tackle real-life problems, we’d love to see you.

This week (as in right now! Check it out and get involved!), we’re joining forces with Firefox for the Ask-A-Fox event on Mozilla Support! Earn swag, join an incredible community, and help fellow Thunderbird users on desktop and Android! Want a great overview of how to contribute to SUMO? Watch our Community Office Hours with advice on getting started.

Android Plans for Q4 2025

It’s hard to believe we’re almost into the last three months of the year! We’ve just released our joint July/August Mobile Progress report. We also want to give you all an update on our overall progress on the roadmap we created at the beginning of the year.

The new Account Drawer, currently in Beta, isn’t finished yet. We’re still working on real, proper unified folders! We’ll have mockups of the account drawer progress before the end of the month and more info in the next beta’s release notes. We’ll also have updates soon on message list status notifications (similar to the desktop). In the single message view, we have improvements coming! This includes making attachments quicker to see and open.

The battle for proper IMAP fetch continues. Different server setups complicate this struggle, but we want to get this right, nonetheless. This will bring the Android app more on par with other emails apps.

Unfortunately, work on things like message sync, notifications, and Android 15 might delay features like HTML signatures.

Mozilla Connect Updates, Continued

We’re tackling more of the most frequently requested changes and features on Mozilla Connect, and we’re answering questions about native operating system integration, conversation view, and Thunderbird Pro related features!

Native Operating System Integration

When your operating system is capable of something Thunderbird isn’t, we share your frustration. We want things like OS-native progress bars that show you how downloads are going. We’ve started work on OS-native notification actions, like deleting messages. We love how helpful and time-saving this is, and want to expand it to things like calendar reminders.

There’s possibility and limitation in this, thanks to both Firefox and the OS itself. Firefox enables us more than it restricts us. For example, our work on the progress bar comes straight from Firefox code. Though there are some limits, and Thunderbird’s different needs as a mail client sometimes mean we need to improve an aspect of Firefox to enable further development. But the beauty of open source means we can contribute our improvements upstream! The OS often constrains us more. For example, we’d love snoozeable native OS calendar notifications, but they just aren’t possible yet.

Conversation View

We just finished an entire in-person work week focused on this in Vancouver! Conversation view, if you’re not familiar with it, includes ALL messages in a conversation, including your replies and messages moved to different folders. This feature, along with others, depends on having a single database for all messages in Thunderbird. Our current database doesn’t do this; instead, each folder is its own database.

The new SQLite database, which we’re calling Panorama, will enable a true Conversation View. During the work week, we thought about (and visualized) what the UI will look like. Having developers and designers in the same room was incredibly helpful for a complicated change. (Having a gassy Boston Terrier in said room, less so.) The existing code expects the current database, so we’ll have to rebuild a lot and carefully consider our decisions. The switch to the new database will probably occur next year after the Extended Support Release, behind a preference.

This change will help Thunderbird behave like a modern email client! Moving to Panorama will not only move us into the future, but into the present.

Thunderbird Pro Related-Requests

Three Mozilla Connect requests (Expanding Firefox Relay, a paid Mozilla email domain, and a Thunderbird webmail) were all out of our control once. But now, with the upcoming Thunderbird Pro offerings, these all will be possible! We’re even experimenting with a webmail experience for Thundermail, in addition to using Thunderbird (or even another email client if you want.) We’ll have an upcoming State of the Thunder dedicated to Thunderbird Pro with more info and updates!

Watch the Video (also on PeerTube) Listen to the Podcast

The post State of the Thunder 12: Community, Android, and Mozilla Connect appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

This essay was originally published on The Sidebar, Mozilla’s Substack.

There’s a moment Wiandi Vreeswijk knows well. After tending virtual crops in “Stardew Valley” and chatting with other players on Discord, he types: “I can’t anymore. I have to go lay in bed.” It’s the fatigue from long COVID setting in — and almost always, the replies roll in: “Oh yeah, me too.”

Cozy games like “Stardew Valley,” where players complete simple-yet-satisfying tasks like running a farm, have become a safe space for Wiandi.

A video game developer in the Netherlands, Wiandi led an active lifestyle until he got COVID-19 in 2023. He’s had long COVID since then, which makes it difficult for him to go out with friends and family, or to play some of the more intense video games he once enjoyed. That shift led him to explore a different kind of play, one that emphasizes comfort and connection.

For players like Wiandi who are seeking a slower-paced environment, cozy games offer an easy and welcoming entry point. The genre has seen a 57% increase in online mentions in just one year, as more people seek out calm and connection online.

A space to gather

Wiandi recently started a community on the gaming platform Steam where players with chronic conditions can congregate. Since then, he’s set up a public “Stardew Valley” server where people can drop into a shared game, “farm” and chat as they please. The group currently has 56 members, while a corresponding Discord chat has hundreds of participants. 

“It’s been bigger than I expected,” says Wiandi, who initially started with a Dutch community before expanding internationally. “I noticed that a lot of people wanted to join.”

For Wiandi, the best part of building this online community is connecting with others who can relate to what he’s going through. The virtual world allows him to meet people he otherwise wouldn’t have. He can simply fire off a message on Discord.

Bonding over shared comfort

Laura Dale, an accessibility consultant for video games and the author of “Uncomfortable Labels: My Life as a Gay Autistic Trans Woman,” often plays cozy games to connect with her neurodivergent friends. She says they’ll regularly chat online while building towns in “Animal Crossing” on their respective Nintendo Switches, a group activity that began during COVID lockdowns but is still going strong.

As someone who sometimes finds social chatter challenging, especially when there’s no obvious topic to discuss (like a video game), playing cozy games gave Laura a relaxing way to maintain and build her relationships.

“I found a lot of solace in playing ‘Animal Crossing’ with friends online,” Laura says. “Having this shared activity gave us a safe topic of conversation.”

Each person doesn’t even need to be playing the same game, as long as they share the same cozy vibe.

“We’re all doing different cozy game activities, but we’re doing them together,” Laura adds.

The appeal of low-pressure play

From “Tetris” to “Elden Ring,” there’s a video game out there for everyone. So what is it about cozy games that attracts players like Laura and Wiandi?

For Wiandi, the answer is obvious: Cozy games have a low barrier to entry.

“Even my mom could learn it in like a day,” he says of “Stardew Valley.” “That’s the charm of a cozy game. When you start, even if you have no experience, you don’t feel overwhelmed by any of the mechanics or the visuals. Everything has to be super easy and minimal — the user experience, the music, the sound effects, even the gameplay.”

Many of the defining characteristics of cozy games, like their leisurely pace, mean they’re more accessible to a wider range of gamers. There’s less pressure to press buttons quickly or get the timing of an attack perfectly right. Titles like “Stardew Valley” and “Animal Crossing” also offer a fixed top-down camera angle, which makes them a better option for some gamers who experience motion sickness, compared to the disorienting camera movement of a first-person shooter. In general, cozy games are also less likely to feature the kind of visual overstimulation that’s common in other genres and can be an issue for players with epilepsy or autism. 

For some players with conditions that affect memory or focus, like ADHD, these games are also designed to quickly remind you what task you were in the middle of during your last session. In “Animal Crossing,” for example, there’s almost always a non-player character nearby ready to explain (or re-explain) what you need to do next if you need it.

“All of these things lend themselves to a wide range of neurodiverse players being able to more safely assume that a cozy game is going to be accessible in a way that you can’t assume as easily with other genres,” Laura says.

Accessibility beyond cozy labels

Cozy games aren’t a perfect fit for every type of disability — there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for such a wide and disparate community.

For Grant Stoner, a games journalist who primarily covers physical accessibility in the industry, cozy games aren’t necessarily more or less accessible than any other genre. Stoner was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy type II at 13 months old, and his muscles have weakened over time as a result; he relies on customizable settings and hardware to play most games. There are still some limitations to the types of games he can play, however, including some titles that fall under the cozy genre. 

“Depending on what your disability is, cozy games can be either very overwhelming or very secure safe spaces,” Grant says.

He adds that one of the benefits of a cozy game is the “routines that keep people grounded.” He played an earlier version of “Animal Crossing” for the Nintendo DS handheld, but found that some of the tasks in the latest iteration, for the Nintendo Switch, were too exhausting for him. And anyway, it’s not his video game genre of choice.

“I don’t really like cozy games,” Stoner says. “Not that I think there’s anything wrong with them, it’s just not my genre.” He prefers “intense action games” but still sees the value of titles like “Stardew Valley.” “They have a purpose in the industry.”

Making room for more players

Laura praises the cozy game genre for the many ways it caters to neurodivergent players, but she also recognizes that there’s plenty of room for improvement. One easy fix is in the way these games direct your attention. For plenty of video games, audio cues are a crucial way to convey information, but Laura often plays with the sound off to avoid overstimulation. She’s noticed that some titles are starting to use other methods to achieve the same result.

“I appreciate when cozy games offer visual flashes on screen to communicate information you otherwise need to hear,” Laura says. “Little details like that aren’t always designed for autistic players, but can still be useful.”

For Grant, the most important thing is that the video game industry doesn’t try to shoehorn certain players into a specific type of game or focus its accessibility efforts on just one genre.

“The disabled experience is so individualistic and so vast,” he says. “It’s not fair to the disabled community to say definitively that one [genre] is more accessible than the other.”

As a video game developer himself, Wiandi has plenty of opinions on how to make cozy games better. But for now, he’s just happy to have this new community. 

The small “Stardew Valley” server Wiandi built continues to show how simple interactions in calm digital spaces can create genuine bonds. Players come and go as they please, planting virtual seeds, raising pixelated animals and sharing small triumphs in a chat filled with mutual understanding. 

For Wiandi, the ability to play a game like “Stardew Valley” with other people who are experiencing something similar to him has been empowering.

“It makes me feel good,” he says. “It’s awesome.”

The post Cozy games: A slower pace, and a place to belong  appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Today Mozilla is excited to announce Raffi Krikorian — technologist, innovator and community builder — as our first-ever portfolio wide Chief Technology Officer. 

Reporting to Mozilla President, Mark Surman, Raffi will be part of the team that coordinates efforts across our whole family of organizations. He will work alongside the existing bench of technical leaders including Anthony Enzor-DeMeo (GM / Firefox), Bobby Holley (CTO / Firefox), and Ryan Sipes (Thunderbird).

As AI and technology development becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, Krikorian joins Mozilla at a moment of urgency and opportunity. It is a pivotal time to shape a different future  — one where we build AI we can trust, use with agency, and understand — rather than accept a future defined by opacity and control. Krikorian will lead Mozilla’s efforts to develop trustworthy and open source AI, ensuring Mozilla is inventing and building technology that pushes us all in the right direction. 

“We need to make sure AI and the internet belong to all of us, not just a few big companies,” said Mark Surman, President of Mozilla. “Raffi is the right person to lead that charge — creative, innovative and passionate about responsible technology. He puts wind in our sails, accelerating Mozilla’s mission of building technology based on the values in our Manifesto.”

Krikorian brings a record of impact across sectors to Mozilla, with roles spanning tech, politics, media and philanthropy. Raffi joins us from having been the CTO at Emerson Collective, where he led efforts to bring technologists into sectors like education, the environment, immigration, and economic mobility — and to help people in those sectors see themselves as technologists. He also hosted the “Technically Optimistic” podcast and Substack, exploring technology’s impact on society.

Prior to that, he was the first CTO of the US’s Democratic National Committee, where he used data, technology, and digital security to support the election processes of Democratic candidates up and down the ballot; Director of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center, where he led the development and rollout of the first passenger-carrying self-driving car fleet; and Vice President of Platform Engineering at Twitter, where he managed and built Twitter’s global infrastructure. 

Krikorian has served on the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors since 2023, on Mozilla.ai’s Board since 2024, and on the Mozilla.org Board since its inception.

“We don’t just need critiques on how AI is being built — we need real, working alternatives,” said Krikorian. “Mozilla is one of the few places that can actually do that. It’s built for this moment. I’m excited to join the team and help shape technology that reflects values we care about — transparency, openness, participation, and trust.”

The post Mozilla welcomes Raffi Krikorian as Chief Technology Officer appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

In response to feedback we’ve heard from the community, AMO (addons.mozilla.org) just introduced a new feature allowing developers the ability to quickly roll back to a previously approved extension version. The most common need for roll-back ability are occasions when developers may release a new version they later discover has critical bugs. Now in such cases, instead of needing to make fast fixes and quickly submit an even newer version, which could be further delayed during a review process, developers are free to revert back to a previously approved version.

For users who may have already installed the buggy version that’s later pulled, the extension will update to the roll-back version when Firefox checks for the next update (which occurs every 24 hours by default, save for users who’ve turned off automatic updates from the Add-ons Manager).

To learn more about the new roll-back feature, please visit Extension Workshop.

The post Now you can roll back to a previous version of your extension appeared first on Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog.

We received multiple reports of a phishing campaign targeting crates.io users (from the rustfoundation.dev domain name), mentioning a compromise of our infrastructure and asking users to authenticate to limit damage to their crates.

These emails are malicious and come from a domain name not controlled by the Rust Foundation (nor the Rust Project), seemingly with the purpose of stealing your GitHub credentials. We have no evidence of a compromise of the crates.io infrastructure.

We are taking steps to get the domain name taken down and to monitor for suspicious activity on crates.io. Do not follow any links in these emails if you receive them, and mark them as phishing with your email provider.

If you have any further questions please reach out to security@rust-lang.org and help@crates.io.

We’ve just released a new Thunderbird Conversations (previously know as Gmail Conversation View) with full support for Thunderbird 52. We’re sorry for the delay, but the good news is it should now work fine.

I’d like to thank Jonathan for letting me help out with the release process, and for all those who contributed to release or filed issues.

If you find an issue, please submit it at our support site.

The add-on should work with the current Thunderbird Beta versions (56), but won’t currently work in Daily (57) due to some compatibility issues. We’re hoping to get those resolved in the next week or so.

If you want to help out with future releases, then find the source code here and come and help us with supporting users or fixing issues.

On Monday, I, along with several million other people, decided to view the Great American Eclipse. Since I presently live in Urbana, IL, that meant getting in my car and driving down I-57 towards Carbondale. This route is also what people from Chicago or Milwaukee would have taken, which means traffic was heavy. I ended up leaving around 5:45 AM, which puts me around the last clutch of people leaving.

Our original destination was Goreville, IL (specifically, Ferne Clyffe State Park), but some people who arrived earlier got dissatisfied with the predicted cloudy forecast, so we moved the destination out to Cerulean, KY, which meant I ended up arriving around 11:00 AM, not much time before the partial eclipse started.

Partial eclipses are neat, but they're very much a see-them-once affair. When the moon first entered the sun, you get a flurry of activity as everyone puts on the glasses, sees it, and then retreats back into the shade (it was 90°F, not at all comfortable in the sun). Then the temperature starts to drop—is that the eclipse, or this breeze that started up? As more and more gets covered, then it starts to dim: I had the impression that a cloud had just passed in front of the sun, and I wanted to turn and look at that non-existent cloud. And as the sun really gets covered, then trees start acting as pinhole cameras and the shadows take on a distinctive scalloped pattern.

A total eclipse though? Completely different. The immediate reaction of everyone in the group was to start planning to see the 2024 eclipse. For those of us who spent 10, 15, 20 hours trying to see 2-3 minutes of glory, the sentiment was not only that it was time well spent, but that it was worth doing again. If you missed the 2017 eclipse and are able to see the 2024 eclipse, I urge you to do so. Words and pictures simply do not do it justice.

What is the eclipse like? In the last seconds of partiality, everyone has their eyes, eclipse glasses on of course, staring at the sun. The thin crescent looks first like a side picture of an eyeball. As the time ticks by, the tendrils of orange slowly diminish until nothing can be seen—totality. Cries come out that it's safe to take the glasses off, but everyone is ripping them off anyways. Out come the camera phones, trying to capture that captivating image. That not-quite-perfect disk of black, floating in a sea of bright white wisps of the corona, not so much a circle as a stretched oval. For those who were quick enough, the Baily's beads can be seen. The photos, of course, are crap: the corona is still bright enough to blot out the dark disk of the moon.

Then, our attention is drawn away from the sun. It's cold. It's suddenly cold; the last moment of totality makes a huge difference. Probably something like 20°F off the normal high in that moment? Of course, it's dark. Not midnight, all-you-see-are-stars dark; it's more like a dusk dark. But unlike normal dusk, you can see the fringes of daylight in all directions. You can see some stars (or maybe that's just Venus; astronomy is not my strong suit), and of course a few planes are in the sky. One of them is just a moving, blinking light in the distance; another (chasing the eclipse?) is clearly visible with its contrail. And the silence. You don't notice the usual cacophony of sounds most of the time, but when everyone shushes for a moment, you hear the deafening silence of insects, of birds, of everything.

Naturally, we all point back to the total eclipse and stare at it for most of the short time. Everything else is just a distraction, after all. How long do we have? A minute. Still more time for staring. A running commentary on everything I've mentioned, all while that neck is craned skyward and away from the people you're talking to. When is it no longer safe to keep looking? Is it still safe—no orange in the eclipse glasses, should still be fine. How long do we need to look at the sun to damage our eyes? Have we done that already? Are the glasses themselves safe? As the moon moves off the sun, hold that stare until that last possible moment, catch the return of the Baily's beads. A bright spark of sun, the photosphere is made visible again, and then clamp the eyes shut as hard as possible while you fumble the glasses back on to confirm that orange is once again visible.

Finally, the rush out of town. There's a reason why everyone leaves after totality is over. Partial eclipses really aren't worth seeing twice, and we just saw one not five minutes ago. It's just the same thing in reverse. (And it's nice to get back in the car before the temperature gets warm again; my dark grey car was quite cool to the touch despite sitting in the sun for 2½ hours). Forget trying to beat the traffic; you've got a 5-hour drive ahead of you anyways, and the traffic is going to keep pouring onto the roads over the next several hours anyways (10 hours later, as I write this, the traffic is still bad on the eclipse exit routes). If you want to avoid it, you have to plan your route away from it instead.

I ended up using this route to get back, taking 5 hours 41 minutes and 51 seconds including a refueling stop and a bathroom break. So I don't know how bad I-57 was (I did hear there was a crash on I-57 pretty much just before I got on the road, but I didn't know that at the time), although I did see that I-69 was completely stopped when I crossed it. There were small slowdowns on the major Illinois state roads every time there was a stop sign that could have been mitigated by sitting police cars at those intersections and effectively temporarily signalizing them, but other than that, my trip home was free-flowing at speed limit the entire route.

Some things I've learned:

• It's useful to have a GPS that doesn't require cellphone coverage to figure out your route.
• It's useful to have paper maps to help plan a trip that's taking you well off the beaten path.
• It's even more useful to have paper maps of the states you're in when doing that.
• The Ohio River is much prettier near Cairo, IL than it is near Wheeling, WV.
• The Tennessee River dam is also pretty.
• Driving directions need to make the "I'm trying to avoid anything that smells like a freeway because it's going to be completely packed and impassable" mode easier to access.
• Passing a car by crossing the broken yellow median will never not be scary.
• Being passed by a car crossing the broken yellow median is still scary.
• Driving on obscure Kentucky state roads while you're playing music is oddly peaceful and relaxing.
• The best test for road hypnosis is seeing how you can drive a long, straight, flat, featureless road. You have not seen a long, straight, flat, featureless road until you've driven something like an obscure Illinois county road where the "long, straight" bit means "20 miles without even a hint of a curve" and the "featureless" means "you don't even see a house, shed, barn, or grain elevator to break up corn and soy fields." Interstates break up the straight bit a lot, and state highways tend to have lots of houses and small settlements on them that break up endless farm fields.
• Police direction may not permit you to make your intended route work.