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Mozilla brengt Firefox met nieuw ontwerp uit  tweakers.net

Software-update: Mozilla Firefox 157.0 - Computer - Downloads  tweakers.net

What comes to mind when you think of Firefox? Is it our best-in-class privacy features and ad blocking capabilities? Our partnerships with Wrexham, NVIDIA or Mistral? Or maybe our adorable mascot Kit?

If you’ve been following Firefox this year, you’ve seen us add new ways to get things done while giving you more choice over how you browse. That includes browsing two pages side by side, adding an extra layer of privacy with built-in VPN, blocking trackers for smoother scrolling and faster load times, and deciding how AI shows up in Firefox. 

For the past few months, many of you have also been trying out our new Firefox design in Nightly and sharing your thoughts with us as we continued to refine the experience.

Today, we’re rolling out that design with FX 157 to everyone using Firefox across desktop and mobile devices. Firefox has done a lot of growing over the last year; now it looks the part. 

A more modern Firefox

When we first shared our plans to design Firefox for the future, we said we wanted Firefox to feel “current, but not generic. Warm, but still precise.” 

That design ethos now carries across all of Firefox. We’ve refreshed the colors, icons and themes throughout the browser, from the tabs and toolbars you use every day to your New Tab page, Private Browsing experience and more, with no cost to your browser performance.

This shared design language across desktop and mobile gives Firefox a consistent foundation for new features and experiences, while keeping the personality that makes Firefox unique. 

Make Firefox yours

We’ve added more choices for how Firefox looks and works, including the return of a feature many of you asked for:

Compact Mode is back. As people started trying the new design, we heard from many of you who wanted to fit more into your browser window. Compact Mode reduces the size of your tabs and toolbar to give more of your screen to the web, with an auto-compact option for smaller screens.

Find your look. A new theme picker makes it easier to explore different looks for Firefox, with new themes and wallpapers to choose from.

Set up New Tab your way. Choose what you want to see on your homepage. Now, you have a dedicated space to pin and organize shortcuts so sites you use all the time stay put.

Refined, not reinvented

Themes and wallpapers may change over time, but the things that made people choose Firefox in the first place are still the same. We’re still independent and open source, with privacy protections built into the browser and controls that put you in charge of how Firefox works for you.

This carries through everything we build, from the height of your toolbars and what belongs on your New Tab page to which AI features show up in your browser, which model you choose and what context you want it to have.

Today’s Firefox is a renewal, grounded in the same principles that have shaped it from the beginning, with a new design built to carry Firefox forward. 

For those who have come with us on this journey, thank you for helping us shape the future of Firefox. 

If you’ve been away on hiatus, welcome back. Try the latest Firefox and let us know what you think.

The post More modern. More flexible. Still Firefox. appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Firefox 157 met Nova-redesign nu beschikbaar  ictmagazine.nl

We spend a lot of time browsing online. Whether you are researching for work, planning a trip, paying your bills, or scrolling through social media, your browser is there for it all.

While all these tasks are very different in nature, a lot of people still tend to stick to the same window type for all their use cases. But what if there was a different way to browse?

You may have noticed Firefox now has three window options for desktop. On top of the Classic and Private windows you’ve known for years, a third choice has been rolling out in beta: Smart Window. This optional AI-powered browsing experience is built to move your work forward and help finish what you started online.

Following the recent addition of several new Smart Window capabilities, we thought now would be the perfect time for a breakdown of what each of our three window options actually does, and when to use them.

Classic: Timeless and tailored to you

Classic Window is still the most customizable option of the three. While Private and Smart windows share many of the same features and capabilities as Classic, a Classic Window offers the widest range of Firefox’s standard personalization options. It gives you the broadest canvas for tailoring Firefox to the way you browse.

What makes it Classic:

• Full oversight over controls, buttons, and toolbars.
• Access to the entire Firefox add-ons library.
• Advanced customization and configuration options. 
• The ability to sync your history, bookmarks, and open tabs across your signed-in devices.

When to use it:

Classic is your home base. It’s the best place to start customizing around your browsing needs, whether that means an extension setup specifically tailored to your workflow, a special theme that matches your style, or just the familiar Firefox experience you created over years of tweaking to your personal taste. While many customizations are also available on Private and Smart window, Classic offers the most extensive line-up of optional browser features, extensions, and aesthetics to personalize your setup.

Classic is the right move for general browsing like scrolling through social media, conducting a quick Google search, or reading online articles. It’s also the best place to start if you are looking to build your browser around you.

Private Window: Browse with greater peace of mind

Private Window stays true to its name and number one priority: it’s designed to limit the information associated with your browser session. When a Private Window is closed, Firefox doesn’t retain session information, such as what you searched for, the sites you visited, or the cookies they set.

What makes it Private:

• Pages visited from a Private Window will not be added to the list of sites in Firefox’s History menu, the Library window’s history list, nor the address bar drop-down list.
• Nothing entered into text boxes on web pages and Search bar will be saved for Form autocomplete.
• Cookies set in a Private Window are kept only temporarily in memory, separate from your regular cookies, and are discarded after your last Private Window is closed.
• Extensions are off by default in a Private Window, unless you explicitly grant them permission.

When to use it:

A Private Window is recommended when you don’t want activity from a browsing session sitting in your history, such as shopping for a gift. It’s also helpful when browsing on a shared device, ensuring your history, logins, and cookies will not be saved for the next person.

You may not need a Private Window every time you open your browser, but it’s always there for you when you do.

Smart Window: Firefox’s privacy-first, AI-powered browsing experience to help get stuff done

Smart Window is Firefox’s newest window type, currently rolling out in Beta to users in the U.S., Canada, and France. Think of it as a Classic Firefox window with a built-in AI assistant layered on top – one that you can choose to have utilize your open tabs, recent browsing, and the page in front of you, so it can help you do more without switching contexts – all with the privacy and security you expect from Firefox.

What makes it Smart:

• A built-in assistant that can summarize pages, generate recommendations, compare information, and plan tasks using your open tabs.
• The ability to retrieve current web information and display the sources behind its response without taking you to a separate search results page, supported by Firefox’s new partnership with Exa.
• Suggested groups for related tabs. 
• Visual previews of pages from your browsing history, so you can surface the page you’re looking for more easily among similar results without opening each one.
• The choice of three AI models to power the assistant, as well as the option to bring your own model.
• Optional “memories,” built from either your Smart Window chats or your browsing activity in both Smart and Classic windows, or both. Memories help the assistant give you more helpful, personalized answers over time. They are stored locally on your device and can be deleted at any time.

When to use it:

Smart Window shines when you need a little extra help finishing what you started. Its ability to work with the context you choose to share can help you make progress on ongoing tasks that may require more than one session, like trip or event planning, comparison price shopping, or conducting research for work or personal reasons.

And with Smart Window’s optional memories, which learn your patterns and preferences over time (with your permission), Smart Window gets more useful the more you use it, keeping you from having to spell everything out from scratch each time.  

Selecting the right window for the job

None of these windows is “better” than the others, they’re built for different moments.

The good news is you are never locked into one. Firefox lets you move between all three depending on what you’re doing, so you can choose the window that fits each task.

You can access Classic and Private windows at any time from the Firefox menu. As for Smart Window, it remains in beta, with current availability to people in the U.S., Canada, and France.

To try Smart Window, visit https://www.firefox.com/smart-window. Or, if it’s not available in your region yet, you can sign up to be notified when it is.

The post Classic, Private, or Smart? Choose the right Firefox window for every task appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

When it’s Monday morning and you’re on the subway, in a coffee shop, or squeezing in a few email replies after your morning workout, your phone becomes your digital office. But every time you open your browser, you risk getting struck with any combination of distracting ads, auto-playing videos, and open tabs from the previous week competing for your attention.

For many remote and on-the-go workers, your mobile browser can become a minefield of interruptions and distractions, slowing you down when you need to focus most.

Luckily, there are multiple Firefox features that can help ensure your mobile browser is a focused, productive workspace.

Reduce distractions and clutter with Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS

Opening a link shared via text or email can save time and keep things moving when a client or coworker needs a fast response. However, once it’s actually opened, there is a lot of opportunity for various pop-ups, overlays, and ads to get in between you and what you came in to do.

Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS was built to reduce distractions and screen clutter while you browse, so you can stay focused on the task at hand. It’s a built-in, optional feature that blocks many intrusive ad formats, third-party ad networks, and ad-related trackers. That means no separate extension required, and you decide if and when to use it. 

Because Firefox’s strong line-up of ad-blocking and privacy extensions on desktop and Android are not available in the same way on iOS, we built Ad Blocker for Firefox directly into the browser. To decide what gets blocked, Ad Blocker uses the EasyList filter and Apple’s WebKit Content Blocker technology. It won’t impact every ad or sponsored content on a new tab, as those presented directly by host sites and displayed in search results will still be visible.

To try Ad Blocker on iOS, go to Settings > Browsing > Ad Blocker and turn it on to enjoy a cleaner browsing experience.

Get the gist faster with Shake to Summarize

When you’re on a deadline, scanning through heavy text, ads, and filler content can turn a quick scan into an infinite scroll session.

Firefox’s Shake to Summarize feature helps people get the gist in seconds on both iOS and Android. To use it, simply shake your phone on any web page under 5,000 words, and a clean summary of the page’s content will instantly appear. It can also be activated by tapping the “Summarize Page” option under “More” in the three-dot menu.

Like all Firefox features, we built Shake to Summarize with your privacy and protection in mind. This means using device-specific technology to keep your data secure. You can learn more about the AI powering this feature here.   

The feature launched on iOS last September, received a strong response from users, and earned a special mention in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025. It is now available on iOS and Android in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese.

Keep your tabs tidy with Tab Groups on Android

Just like us, our smartphones tend to live multiple lives: work, personal, and everything in between. While it can be incredibly convenient to have everything you need for all parts of your life on one device, things can get cluttered fast.

One minute you are knee-deep in a client proposal and the next you’re flicking through the countless Google searches from over the weekend. “How old is Harry Styles?” and “Movie times near me” – while pertinent when you were off the clock 24 hours ago – have absolutely nothing to do with the work you are trying to get done now.

To help make sure your prep for Thursday’s client meeting doesn’t get lost in your pop music deep dive from the weekend, you can group related tabs in Firefox for Android. Each group can be labeled and assigned a color, appearing as a single, searchable card in the tab tray rather than separate tabs, so it’s easy to locate when needed. You can open, rename, recolor, and delete these cards whenever you want.

To use Tab Groups on Android, simply drag one tab onto another, or select a few and tap “Add to group.” Label the group, choose a color, and you’re all set. To try it out, download the latest version of Firefox for Android. iOS support for this feature is on the way.

Pick up where you left off across devices with Firefox Sync

Sometimes we start a task on one device and finish it on another. Maybe you found an article on your computer that you want to read on the subway on your phone. Or, perhaps you want to pull out your laptop and finish filling out that lease application you started on your tablet.

Enable Firefox Sync and you can resume tasks you paused in your browser when switching across your mobile phone, tablet, and laptop. The feature lets you access your open tabs, bookmarks, and passwords across all the devices you access Firefox on.

The best part? We put your data privacy first. Firefox Sync uses end-to-end encryption so your synced data is encrypted before it reaches Mozilla’s servers.

To take your browsing experience with you wherever you go, connect your iOS or Android phone to your Mozilla account and start syncing with your other devices.

Take back control of your focus with Firefox

For remote and on-the-go workers, focus is everything.

With Firefox features like built-in ad blocking on iOS, Shake to Summarize for instant insights, and Tab Groups on Android to keep your work and personal digital spaces organized, you can transform your phone from a distraction hub into a productive workspace.

Download the latest version of Firefox for Android or Firefox for iOS today to test out any of the above features available on your device – and take back control of your attention.

The post Stay focused wherever you work with Firefox mobile browsers appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Today at ALL IN, Canada’s largest AI and technology event, Mozilla and Mila announced a new initiative and fresh investment to build an open source AI foundation layer that enables organizations and institutions to own and operate advanced AI systems locally, ensuring full control over their technology and data. 

Doubling down on its commitment to open source AI, the Government of Canada announced its support for the initiative. Mila will lead the technical delivery and coordination of the project, while Mozilla contributes technical expertise. It also provided the initial $5 million investment to kick off the project. Hypertec is committing an additional $1 million in first-year funding to accelerate initial Canadian deployments of the open source AI foundation layer on Hypertec hardware. 

“Canada has a choice: depend on technologies developed elsewhere, or build more of what we need here at home,” said The Honourable Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario. “Open source AI gives Canadian businesses and institutions greater control over their technology and data, while making powerful tools more affordable, accessible, and easier to adapt. By supporting this work, we are strengthening Canada’s capacity to build and adopt AI on our own terms.” 

Mila and Mozilla will lead the work together: Mila drawing on a world-class community of close to 2,000 researchers and professionals, Mozilla as technical partner from industry, bringing 25 years of experience stewarding open infrastructure others build on. Mila and Mozilla are actively engaging new partners, inviting companies, research institutions, funders, governments, and developers to join and support this work. 

What’s being built

The goal is simple: make owning your AI as easy as renting it. Using open source models was never the hard part. Turning a raw open source model into something a small business, a hospital, a local charity, or a government can run in production — secure, reliable, plugged into everything else — takes an engineering team most organizations and institutions do not have and months they can’t spare. 

The goal is to offer businesses and organizations a ready-to-use AI package that they can run privately and keep under their own control, rather than having to build a complex system themselves or rely entirely on expensive, pay-per-use proprietary AI services.

For example, a small manufacturer could use the system as a private AI assistant for its employees. It could search the company’s manuals, procedures, and past project files; help staff draft reports or answer technical questions; and help its software team write and improve code. Because the system is designed to be able to run locally, the company could do this while keeping its proprietary information and data within its own environment.

That also means lower costs. For the vast majority of everyday business tasks, companies will be able to use open source AI running on open source tools instead of paying a commercial provider every time an employee makes a request. But this requires reducing the technical work and expense involved in putting open source AI into practice.

This initiative was founded to solve that problem, building the free layer that makes owning open source AI easy — the same kind of layer the web was built on. It has two halves: An open standard, published as interface contracts, so any part of the stack can be swapped for a better one. And a working “reference implementation” any organization can install on its own machines or the ones it chooses, running the models and controls it chooses against its own data, with governance and access control built in from the start. The ambition is that with the standards and foundation in place, open source AI can be built anywhere, by anyone. 

“Six months ago, we announced our partnership with Mozilla to advance open source and sovereign AI. Today, we are bringing that work to a whole new level,” said Valérie Pisano, President and CEO of Mila. “By delivering an open, secure AI foundation layer, we empower organizations, from small businesses to non-profits to governments, to own their technological future so they can run, control, and maintain AI models themselves. At Mila, our research community has always believed that for AI to be trustworthy and accessible, it must be built on open standards that keep control in local hands.”

The work already underway

Over the last six months, Mila and Mozilla have been designing the architecture, deciding which open source components belong at each layer, and testing that the whole system works end to end. This investment builds on that progress. 

Working alongside Mila and Mozilla, Hypertec will help move the initiative from research and reference implementation to real-world adoption by Canadian businesses and institutions, providing a practical, private, and cost-effective path to deploy AI while maintaining greater control over their data and technology.

“AI is advancing at an extraordinary pace and has the potential to transform our economy and society for the better. Canada has an important role to play in ensuring that AI is developed and adopted responsibly, said Simon Ahdoot, CEO of Hypertec Group. “Hypertec is proud to help turn open source innovation into AI that Canadian organizations can deploy securely and under their own control. This is exactly the kind of partnership between government, research, and Canadian industry needed to realize the full potential of AI.”

Why now

Mozilla’s State of Open Source AI report found that while 79% of developers adding AI functionality use open models, only 53% of teams ever reach production, stopped by cost, security, integration, and maintenance. This work aims to change that.

“AI today is at a crossroads, where it could be closed and owned by a few, or open and available to every coder, developer, enterprise, and nation,” said Mark Surman, President of Mozilla. That’s what we’re building — an open source AI ecosystem that fits together as seamlessly as the web, and that anyone, anywhere can build on.  We’re so grateful to Canada for scaling this work, and call on partners across sectors — from enterprises and governments to coders and startups — to join us in building this future.” 

Within six months, Mozilla and Mila expect to publish working reference implementations for enterprise, government and public-interest use cases. The two-year ambition is bigger: to have solved this problem outright, so that open source AI can be adopted fully and easily, anywhere, by anyone.

The post Mila and Mozilla announce new initiative to build trustworthy open source AI for everyone, with Canadian government support appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

The AI race is shifting. Again. Practically overnight, competition has expanded from “which AI model is best?” to a new high-stakes battle over which models people can access, through which products, and whether people have meaningful choice about AI at all.

In response, Mozilla and Mistral today announced a partnership built on a shared idea: a new, open-source AI model alternative to Big Tech-default browser ecosystems. The intent: a model deliberately designed to keep the web open to technological diversity, competition, and choice.

And we’re putting this idea into practice in Firefox. 

Mistral Small 4 is coming to Firefox Smart Window beta (learn more about Firefox Smart Window here), becoming a new AI model for Smart Window users in the US and Canada, while expanding Smart Window beta access and French-language support to Firefox users in France. Across all markets where Smart Window beta is available, Firefox users can still choose from a multitude of other AI models. 

“AI is becoming part of how people experience the web every day. We want to make sure that doesn’t mean people are chained to one company’s self-serving pipeline. With the browser sitting at the heart of the web and online experience, it should be a place where different AI providers can compete and open source has a seat at the table.

This isn’t just a product partnership. A browser shouldn’t be a one-way funnel. It should preserve what made the internet powerful to begin with: the freedom to explore, discover different ideas and tech, and decide for ourselves where to go next,” said Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, CEO of Mozilla Corporation.

Choice and competition are worth protecting

As AI integration becomes increasingly concentrated, we are in jeopardy of a handful of closed-model companies controlling the browser, the search engine, the AI model, and the surrounding services that connect them. Mozilla and Mistral are betting that independent and interoperable models can offer an alternative to global tech monopolies controlling the next digital era. 

“This partnership represents two open source advocates working together to bring Mistral’s scientific innovations to Mozilla’s consumers around the world. Together, we are bringing privacy, control, and choice to AI-powered web browsing,” said Arthur Mensch, Co-founder and CEO of Mistral.

Meaningful choice isn’t confined to personal preference for one AI model over another. Web products need to be able to work with different AI providers, and people deserve the option of switching without being locked into a single company’s ecosystem. When a tech layer as far-reaching and influential as AI is controlled by a small handful of players, it risks creating closed systems and closed doors, making it harder for new ideas and better technologies to grow, reach users, and compete on merits. 

Mozilla and Mistral aim to keep that door open. The combination of an independent browser with a frontier European AI company gives people and institutions greater access to useful, responsible AI, the opposite of locking them into one company’s singular technology ecosystem. 

Selecting Mistral, and expanding to France

Mozilla selected Mistral Small 4 after evaluating its performance for Smart Window Beta, including multilingual performance, an important part of the fit. The companies approached multilingual and multicultural tuning as a core model feature, rather than simply adapting an English-first experience for a new market. 

For Firefox users, Mistral access starts with Smart Window Beta, a browsing experience designed to turn AI into a useful assistant for the things we do online: making sense of complex search trails, finding something valuable you clicked away from, presenting data sources, and generally picking up where day-to-day internet use got left off. 

France is the first new market for Smart Window with official French-language support. Mozilla is planning additional European expansion later this year.

A different kind of AI competition

Our Mistral partnership puts an ambitious new AI model approach into practice: a multilingual, globally competitive European AI company reaching people through an independent browser, leveraging openness to create more room for new technologies to compete and succeed. Mistral can reach Firefox users without owning the browser, and Mozilla can integrate and recommend Mistral without removing user choice.

It is a natural extension of the principles that have shaped Firefox and the open web, and the kind of AI ecosystem we intend to continue building.

The post Mozilla and Mistral: Partnering to expand AI competition and preserve user choice appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

One of the biggest challenges Rust developers report in our annual surveys is a subpar debugging experience. So, back in February, we ran our first Rust Debugging Survey, in the hopes of identifying how Rust developers are using debuggers and what problems they are facing when doing so. We received over 2,300 responses, and we'd like to thank everyone who took the time to participate in the survey!

In this report, we'll go over some of the results of the survey. If you'd like, you can also check out the complete results of the survey.

If you'd like to skip ahead to any particular section, you can do so with this index:

• Who Uses Debuggers?
• How Are Debuggers Used?
• Challenges
• Debugger Visualizers
• Closing Remarks

Who Uses Debuggers?

The first step to making sense of the survey results is understanding who took the survey. We asked respondents to rate their Rust expertise, from "Never used it" to "Advanced". Over 80% reported themselves as "Advanced" or "Intermediate", split roughly evenly between the two:

<noscript> <img alt="how-would-you-rate-your-rust-expertise" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/how-would-you-rate-your-rust-expertise.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG]

We also asked respondents if they currently use or have used debuggers in Rust. Over 46% said they currently do, with the remaining responses split between "have in the past" and "never have". That means that over half of respondents do not currently use a debugger for Rust!

<noscript> <img alt="do-you-use-debuggers-in-rust" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/do-you-use-debuggers-in-rust.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG]

Categorized by expertise, the responses reveal that roughly half of "beginners" have never used debuggers in Rust! On the other hand, nearly half of "advanced users" currently do use debuggers in Rust:

<noscript> <img alt="do-you-use-debuggers-in-rust-per-expertise" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/do-you-use-debuggers-in-rust-per-expertise.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG]

For respondents who indicated they had previously used Rust but no longer did, we asked if challenges with debugging support were why they stopped. For nearly 3%, the answer was "yes", with an additional 24% reporting debugging issues as being partially responsible (though mind the small response count; most respondents were active users of Rust):

<noscript> <img alt="were-issues-with-debugging-support-the-primary-reason-why-you-stopped-using-rust" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/were-issues-with-debugging-support-the-primary-reason-why-you-stopped-using-rust.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG] How Are Debuggers Used?

Knowing what debuggers developers are using and how is another important part of understanding the challenges they face. To this end, we asked respondents how they were debugging their programs. Unsurprisingly, most developers make use of print debugging and the dbg! macro. Excluding those, using lldb inside an IDE was the most popular choice, followed by gdb on the command line:

<noscript> <img alt="what-tools-and-workflows-do-you-use-to-debug-rust-programs" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/what-tools-and-workflows-do-you-use-to-debug-rust-programs.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG]

We can get a more detailed breakdown of these results if we include the operating system on which the respondents use a given debugging approach. We examine this from two different angles. The first angle being, "On operating system X, what percent of responses are using debugger Y?". Print debugging and the dbg! macro are consistently the top two yet again, but looking beyond that, things get more interesting. On Linux, using gdb on the command line was the most popular choice by a thin margin, beating lldb in an IDE by only 0.4%. On Windows, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and macOS, lldb in an IDE was the top pick by at least 6%, making it a very popular choice in general. On Windows, the three least popular choices were the command line debuggers (gdb CLI, lldb CLI, and BugStalker), and on both Windows and macOS the third most popular pick was, "I don't know". Those who were debugging on operating systems not listed (Other) most frequently used some kind of special embedded debugger or gdb:

<noscript> <img alt="what-tools-and-workflows-do-you-use-to-debug-rust-programs-per-os-1" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/what-tools-and-workflows-do-you-use-to-debug-rust-programs-per-os-1.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG]

The other angle we can look at these responses from is, "For users of debugger X, what percent of responses are using it on operating system Y?". For most debuggers, Linux makes up the largest portion of uses, ranging from about 45% to about 77%, followed by Windows, then macOS. The most notable exceptions are WinDbg and the Visual Studio debugger, which are primarily used on Windows, and lldb, which is used more on macOS than Windows in an IDE and on the command line:

<noscript> <img alt="what-tools-and-workflows-do-you-use-to-debug-rust-programs-per-os-2" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/what-tools-and-workflows-do-you-use-to-debug-rust-programs-per-os-2.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG]

To the 6 respondents who use WinDbg on Linux: we wish you luck!

As for how people actually use their debugger of choice, the aggregate results are not particularly surprising. Roughly 87% of users are using debuggers for stepping line-by-line through programs and a little over half of users are using debuggers to obtain stack traces from hung/crashed processes. Only a quarter of the respondents use a debugger to debug async code. That might be partially caused by the async Rust debugging experience being clumsy and incomplete, or it could just be that users aren't writing much async code:

<noscript> <img alt="what-are-you-using-debuggers-for" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/what-are-you-using-debuggers-for.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG] [Wordcloud of open answers]

If we break these results down by expertise, we can learn a bit more about usage patterns. As users become more experienced with Rust, their use of debuggers for learning purposes decreases, and they get more stack traces from crashed processes:

<noscript> <img alt="what-are-you-using-debuggers-for-per-expertise" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/what-are-you-using-debuggers-for-per-expertise.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG]

The final bit of insight into how Rustaceans use debuggers is if they are debugging programs that use Rust alongside other programming languages. For 44% of respondents, the answer is "yes", which is a pretty high number!

As for which languages those are, C dominates the scene at a little over 70%, followed by C++ at about 43% and Python at about 20%:

<noscript> <img alt="do-you-debug-programs-that-combine-rust-with-any-of-the-following-languages" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/do-you-debug-programs-that-combine-rust-with-any-of-the-following-languages.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG] [Wordcloud of open answers] Challenges

Instead of diving right into asking, "what problems do you face when using debuggers?", or something to that effect, we first asked respondents why they decide against using debuggers whenever they do, including for reasons that aren't necessarily "problems with debuggers".

The most commonly reported reason was that it was easier or faster to use logs or print debugging to solve problems, reported by a little over 81% of respondents. This could partially be explained by the open responses, which featured complaints that debuggers were too difficult to set up and/or use (especially on Windows, when dealing with Web Assembly, or in embedded contexts) and sentiment suggesting that small and/or simple problems just don't really need a debugger. It does leave one wondering if the user experience could be made convenient enough to dethrone print debugging, but it seems hard to beat something so intuitive. This is followed by roughly 37% of respondents who write code that Just Works. Fair enough. After that, about 26% of respondents indicated that they've decided not to use debuggers in situations where the language features they were working with had poor support. This is slightly more than issues with standard library types, at about 22%, which is slightly more than issues with external library types, at about 20%:

<noscript> <img alt="when-you-dont-use-a-debugger-why-dont-you" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/when-you-dont-use-a-debugger-why-dont-you.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG] [Wordcloud of open answers]

As stepping through code was anticipated to be one of the most common uses for debuggers, we directly asked respondents if they faced any issues when doing so. A little over 51% of respondents said they did! Of those who reported that they experienced issues stepping through code, we asked when they were experiencing issues. Async code was the most common case reported at slightly over 28%, followed by code involving macros at about 23%. The least common case reported was code involving function pointers, at almost 6%:

<noscript> <img alt="when-do-you-experience-issues-with-trying-to-step-through-code-with-your-debugger" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/when-do-you-experience-issues-with-trying-to-step-through-code-with-your-debugger.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG] [Wordcloud of open answers]

We also directly asked respondents which types in the standard library were hard to work with, if any. This was an open-response question, and reading through the responses, some particularly common complaints were with enums and collections, particularly std::collections::HashMap and std::vec::Vec. This is also visible in the word cloud in the full report.

We asked respondents to indicate which pain points, if any, they have encountered when using debuggers with Rust. At slightly over 74%, poor representation of values was the most common pain point by a decent margin, followed by being unable to print variables at just over 55%:

<noscript> <img alt="which-of-these-pain-points-have-you-experienced-using-a-debugger-with-rust" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/which-of-these-pain-points-have-you-experienced-using-a-debugger-with-rust.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG] Debugger Visualizers

We asked respondents to indicate if they were library authors, and if so, if they were aware of and using the debugger_visualizer attribute. Nearly 62% of respondents indicated that they were library authors who were not aware of this attribute:

<noscript> <img alt="if-you-are-a-library-author-are-you-aware-of-and-using-the-debugger-visualizer-attribute" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/if-you-are-a-library-author-are-you-aware-of-and-using-the-debugger-visualizer-attribute.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG]

For those who indicated that they were library authors who knew about the attribute but did not use it, we also asked why. This represented a much smaller fraction of respondents, so keep that in mind! That said, half of these library authors indicated that they didn't have the time to maintain visualizer attributes, and just under half indicated they didn't know how to write visualizer scripts:

<noscript> <img alt="why-dont-you-use-the-debugger-visualizer-attribute" src="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/07/rust-debugging-survey-2026-results/why-dont-you-use-the-debugger-visualizer-attribute.png" /> </noscript> [PNG] [SVG] [Wordcloud of open answers]

For those of you who have been reading this section asking yourself what the debugger_visualizer attribute is, you can read up on it in The Rust Reference: Debugger Attributes. The quick explanation is that the debugger_visualizer attribute can be applied to modules or the crate root to embed files in the debug information which improve the display of values with certain debuggers. The two currently supported file types are Natvis files, used by Microsoft debuggers such as WinDbg, and GDB "pretty printers", which are structured Python scripts used by GDB.

Closing Remarks

Thanks to your participation in this survey, we've gained some great insights about how Rustaceans are using debuggers and what issues they are facing. For example, knowing that such a high number of users are dealing with poor representation of values pairs well with knowing which standard library types are causing issues, knowing that many library authors haven't heard of the debugger_visualizer attribute, and knowing that many of those who have but don't use it either don't know how or don't have time to maintain visualizer scripts.

Looking to the future, the survey results have suggested that there are a few notable ways we could most significantly improve the debugging experience in Rust, such as:

• Fixing the way enums are represented by debuggers so they show actual variants
• Fixing the way collections (such as HashMap) are represented by debuggers so they show their contents, rather than their implementation details
• Fixing the way string types (such as String and CString) are represented by debuggers so they render as text, rather than their implementation details
• Improving the async debugging experience, particularly with stack traces
• Improving stepping through certain state machines (such as iterators and Futures)
• Providing documentation on basic set up and use of some common debuggers

A common suggestion that could resolve those first three points is to use the Debug implementation of types to display them in debuggers. There are challenges to that approach, such as the fact that the Debug implementation is not present in the final binary unless it is actually used somewhere in the program, but it isn't impossible. Notably, this is already supported by the BugStalker debugger (given the same condition that the Debug implementation must actually be used), which some of you first heard about from the survey! It also appears to have some support for async, with plans to expand.

One notable way the debugger experience is currently being improved is through the ongoing Google Summer of Code project improving how we test debug info and visualizer scripts, making it easier to maintain and improve our own visualizer scripts and general compatibility with visualizer scripts without silent breakage or regressions.

Once again, we'd like to thank everyone who took the time to participate in the survey!

Firefox DevTools MCP (firefox-devtools-mcp) 0.10.2 is out on npm.

New tools:

• press_key — sends a single key, optionally with modifiers, to a snapshot element or the focused element (Return, Escape, Tab, arrows, ctrl+shift+t, …).
• type_text — types text key by key into the focused element, with an optional key to press afterwards.
• set_network_cache — bypass or restore the HTTP cache, for the selected tab or browser-wide. Useful before a performance measurement or when verifying a change a cached asset would otherwise hide.

Other changes:

• navigate_page and new_page take an optional wait argument (none, interactive, complete), so an agent can wait for the load event before deciding a page is done.
• Windows: per-user Firefox installs are now detected, instead of failing with “unable to find binary in default location”.
• aarch64 Linux: geckodriver is now resolved on all platforms, fixing “Unable to obtain browser driver” when a native geckodriver is on PATH.
• Several Windows path fixes for --output-file, --log-file and saveTo.
• New generated reference page documenting every tool and its parameters: docs/tools.md (firefox-devtools-mcp/docs/tools.md at main · mozilla/firefox-devtools-mcp · GitHub)

Install:

claude mcp add firefox-devtools npx @mozilla/firefox-devtools-mcp@latest

codex mcp add firefox-devtools – npx @mozilla/firefox-devtools-mcp@latest

For internal Firefox development, swap firefox-devtools-mcp with firefox-devtools-mcp-moz in order to benefit from additional tools, such as chrome-privileged script execution.

Special thanks to all the contributors who filed issues and submitted patches for this release: freema, f3tch (github), jasonanovak and shoemoney.

Full changelog: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-devtools-mcp/releases/tag/v0.10.2
Repository and issues: GitHub - mozilla/firefox-devtools-mcp: Model Context Protocol server for Firefox DevTools - enables AI assistants to inspect and control Firefox browser through WebDriver BiDi · GitHub
Public chatroom: https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#firefox-devtools-mcp:mozilla.org

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The latest version of PerfCompare is now live! This includes the launch of PerfCompare’s Simple View. Read the following blog post, Introducing PerfCompare’s Simple View, to learn more.

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

Highlights:

[kala-moz]

• Bug 2059826 - Simplified View: Create checkbox selection for advanced columns and display how to read the results #1069
• Bug 2059830 Simplified View: Create checkbox selection for expanded row components (#1089)
• Bug 2068296 Simplified View Follow up for expanded view (#1094)
• Bug 2058240: Filters from cookies don’t make it into the URL (#1076)
• Simplified View Follow-up: reduce size of cols and link subtest pills to subtests page (#1083)

Other changes:

[kala-moz]

• Removed silverman and kde warnings (#1082)
• Bug 2059493: Clean up components in perfcompare frontend using the unecessary silverman_kde data (#1079)
• Fix for Bug 2060613: PerfCompare statistical analysis has some NaN values in explanations (#1077)

[gopar]

[bug-2021092] Update light/dark toggle wording to be less ambiguous (#1073)

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 Matrix. Come and chat!

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We heard you. You don’t want to open your PerfCompare performance comparison and feel like you need a background in statistics to interpret the Mann-Whitney-U results. Cliff’s Delta, CLES, and normality tests, oh my! It should not feel like you’ve blindly walked into a college stats exam, unless of course, you love statistics. For the rest, all you want is an easy answer to the question: Did my changes make things faster or slower?

So we fixed that. PerfCompare now shows the bare essentials by default and tucks the heavy statistics one click away.

An approachable default for beginners and occasional users

The results table now leads with the platform, the Base and New values, how far the median moved and its direction, the status (which includes the option to filter out noise) and the size of the change. To create a more advanced view, a single “Advanced options” dropdown allows you to add the expert columns (Cliff’s Delta, CLES, Significance) and the info-rich expanded row details below the full-width graph. A small help section at the top of the results provides a quick explanation of the columns. The purpose is to serve a diverse audience while preserving your selections in the URL so a shared link reproduces your view.

The “Advanced options” dropdown lets you add the precise statistics columns:

• Cliff’s Delta: An effect-size measure of how far the Base and New distributions have pulled apart
• CLES (Common Language Effect Size): The chance a random New run beats a random Base run, e.g. “New wins 78% of the time”
• Significance:  Whether the difference is a real signal or just noise

Each one toggles on independently, so you can surface only Significance or the whole trio.

Expand a result and you get a clean panel: a full-width graph of how your Base and New runs are spread out, a quick summary (platform, app, which direction is “better”), and a little “how to read this graph” tool-tip for anyone who hasn’t stared at a distribution curve before. You can still poke at the graph’s mode controls if you want to dig in.

You can access the extra expanded row details such as effect size and confidence intervals or the full stats table in the “Advanced options” dropdown. Turn on what you need, and the expanded extras lay out in neat two-column rows. If you turn on mode analysis and there aren’t multiple modes to show, we now say “No mode analysis available” instead of a blank space.

Lastly, the advanced columns and expanded-row details you’ve switched on, along with your filters and sorting, are all encoded in the URL. Paste it to a coworker and they’ll land on the same result you were looking at; for filters and sorting, the shared link takes precedence over whatever they had saved locally. (One exception: the “How to read the results” panel is a personal per-browser preference, so it stays with you rather than tagging along on the link.)

What’s next

Several follow-ups on the way:

• Remembering your advanced choices. Right now the advanced columns and expanded-row toggles start from the clean defaults each visit (they only persist in a link). Soon PerfCompare will remember them in your browser the same way we do for filters. However, if you open a shared link from a colleague, their specific view takes priority, overriding your own local settings so you both see the exact same data.
• Carrying your selections into subtests. Today, the Advanced options you pick on the main results page don’t follow you when you open a test’s subtests. We’re wiring it up so whatever you’ve enabled up top is automatically enabled in the subtests dropdown too, for one consistent view.
• Expanding the “How to read the results” cheat sheet to include Cliff’s Delta, CLES, and Significance definitions.

Share your feedback

We want PerfCompare to work for all users, whether you’re chasing your first regression, or you’re an expert who doesn’t want to lose their favorite metrics to a cleaner view. Our answer is separating the simple view from the power user view, and making the toggle obvious and shareable.

The great news is it’s live now! Go expand a Mann-Whitney-U result, click around the Advanced options, and tell us what you think. Please share your feedback, suggestions, or comments on the #perfcompare channel on Matrix. If you’ve encountered a bug or have a feature request, please file them in Bugzilla. We’re listening.

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

Highlights:

• [Andrew Creskey] Show which network requests were prefetched (#6259)
• [Florian Quèze] profiler-cli: accept --limit 0 as unlimited, and make truncation loud (#6267)

Other Changes:

• [Nazım Can Altınova] Update oxfmt 0.59.0 → 0.63.0 (major) (#6262)
• [Florian Quèze] profiler-cli: document the marker field:value search syntax (#6265)
• [Florian Quèze] profiler-cli: report one time base for text and JSON output (#6266)
• [Florian Quèze] profiler-cli: avoid a stack overflow on large marker threads (#6264)
• [Markus Stange] Give the frameTable a lib column (#6258)
• [Florian Quèze] profiler-cli: report the network request count the filters ran against (#6274)
• [Nazım Can Altınova] Fix dark mode contrast of the warning icons in the publish panel (#6280)
• [Nazım Can Altınova] Extract the publish panel warning indicator into a small component (#6282)
• [Markus Stange] More typed arrays in the FrameTable (and a flags column) (#6173)
• [Nazım Can Altınova] Improve the profiler-cli publish script and document the whole deployment in a better way (#6260)
• [fatadel] Sync: l10n → main (September 3, 2026) (#6301)
• [fatadel] Bump profiler-cli version to 0.9.0 (#6302)

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

• es-CL: ravmn
• nl: Mark Heijl
• sv-SE: Andreas Pettersson
• sv-SE: Luna Jernberg
• sv-SE: Peter Kihlstedt
• tr: Selim Şumlu
• tr: giray
• zh-CN: 高乐喆

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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The Rust team has published a new point release of Rust, 1.98.1. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

If you have a previous version of Rust installed via rustup, getting Rust 1.98.1 is as easy as:

rustup update stable

If you don't have it already, you can get rustup from the appropriate page on our website.

What's in 1.98.1

Rust 1.98.1 fixes a miscompilation in vtable generation.

In Rust 1.98.0, in some circumstances, rustc would incorrectly generate a trait object vtable with a null pointer where a function pointer should be. This leads to undefined behavior in the emitted code. In some cases this may 'just' cause segfaults due to the null pointer being loaded, but it is possible for it to be justification for arbitrary effects (as is typical for UB).

If you'd like to help us out by testing future releases, you might consider using the beta (rustup default beta) and nightly (rustup default nightly) channels locally and in your CI. Please report any bugs you might come across!

Contributors to 1.98.1

Many people came together to create Rust 1.98.1. We couldn't have done it without all of you. Thanks!

As many of you know, Microsoft will be disabling Exchange Web Services (EWS) support on its Microsoft 365 platform later this year. The Thunderbird Desktop team has been hard at work to ensure continuity of functionality through this transition, and today we are pleased to announce the release of native Thunderbird support for the Microsoft Graph API! Curious what this means for you? Then keep reading to find out!

IMAP and EWS and Graph, Oh My!

When connecting to either on-premises or hosted Microsoft accounts, Thunderbird users now have an array of options. Users might not know which option is best for their case, so we’ll start with a little bit of guidance to help users decide what will be best for them. First off, if you are currently using IMAP with an on-premises Exchange account or a Microsoft 365 hosted account, and it’s currently working for you, then there’s nothing you need to do! EWS and Graph support are for users whose organizations do not allow IMAP access.

Now for the more complicated part. Last year, we released EWS email support for both on-premises Exchange accounts and Microsoft 365 hosted accounts. If you are using the EWS protocol with an on-premises Exchange account, then you don’t need to do anything.

However, if your organization uses Microsoft 365 for email, and you’re currently using EWS to connect to that account, then you need to take action before October of this year. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they would begin a phased shutdown of EWS on Microsoft 365/Exchange Online starting in October of 2026 with the goal of a complete shutdown in 2027. If you are currently using Thunderbird’s EWS support to connect to a Microsoft 365/Exchange Online email account, then you will need to switch to the Microsoft Graph API support to keep using Thunderbird beyond these dates. See below for details.

So the TL;DR is:

• IMAP for on-premises or Microsoft 365 hosted email => No action required.
• EWS for on-premises Exchange => No action required.
• EWS for Microsoft 365/Exchange Online => Set up a new Microsoft Graph account in Thunderbird.

Microsoft only supports the Graph protocol on Microsoft 365, so that is the only provider that offers it. On-premises Exchange servers do not implement the Graph API, so Thunderbird’s EWS support will continue to be the primary mechanism for users on these servers to connect to their email accounts.

Microsoft Graph Account Set Up

Thunderbird does not support migrating accounts to different protocols. Instead, you will need to set up a new account. If you have an existing EWS-connected Microsoft 365 account, first you’ll need to delete that account in Thunderbird. You can do this from the account settings. Deleting the account locally in Thunderbird will not affect any data stored on Microsoft 365, so your data is safe.

Once your previous EWS account has been deleted, you can use Account Hub to set up a new account. In the new account set up dialog, enter your Microsoft 365 hosted email account. Thunderbird should automatically detect that your email is hosted on Microsoft 365 and will give you a few options for getting connected. Choose the Microsoft Graph option, and you should be good to go! If for some reason automatic configuration doesn’t work, you can still configure your account manually using these instructions.

What is currently supported?

As with EWS, Thunderbird’s current Graph support extends only to email. Thunderbird does not yet support Calendar and Address Book functionality with either EWS or Graph.

What’s in ESR?

Thunderbird’s current Extended Support Release, version 153, supports the EWS protocol, but does not support the Microsoft Graph API, which was first enabled in the Thunderbird Release channel in version 154. Users on the ESR channel who are using Microsoft 365 will need to migrate to the Release channel in order to use the Microsoft Graph API support to continue accessing Microsoft 365 hosted mailboxes.

What’s Next?

Calendar and Address Book! The Thunderbird Desktop team has already started working on support for connecting to Microsoft 365-hosted calendars using the Graph protocol. We will be busily working on this throughout the rest of the year. As with our previous work on Thunderbird support for EWS, this is the first new calendar protocol to be added to Thunderbird in many years. We are currently doing some up-front design work to ensure a sustainable product going forward and hopefully make the next calendar protocol easier to add.

How can users give us feedback?

As with all new functionality, there may be features we are missing or unexpected issues. As always, Bugzilla is always open! You can send us feature requests and issue reports using this Bugzilla link. Thunderbird’s greatest strength is its community of users, developers, and supporters who help us deliver the best tools we can to connect people with one another. We welcome community involvement to help us make everything better!

Nitty-Gritty development details

Those of you who have followed along with development throughout EWS and into Graph support might have noticed that, compared to EWS, we were able to implement support for the Microsoft Graph API relatively quickly. This is largely due to the up-front thought and work that went into the design and development of Thunderbird’s EWS support. The Graph implementation was the team’s first test of the extensibility of the new architecture, and we were very pleased with the results. It took 11 months to enable basic synchronization with EWS. With the new architecture, we were able to cut that time down to 4 months with Graph.

Graph’s operations are similar to the operations that EWS provides, but different enough that it served as a great first test case for how the new email client architecture can support future protocols, such as JMAP. Given the results of the Graph implementation, we are optimistic that the same architecture will extend to JMAP once the team decides to move forward to that new protocol. We are hopeful that what we have built here can provide a sustainable base on which to build future protocol support in Thunderbird.

This would not have been possible without many contributions from Thunderbird developers, past and present, and the community of users who have helped us improve Thunderbird by submitting issue reports and feature requests. We are grateful to everyone for their support!

The post Thunderbird Desktop New Protocol Support: Microsoft Graph API appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

People feel differently about AI, and here at Firefox, we think that is completely reasonable. Something else that is completely reasonable: deciding for yourself how and when you engage with AI features.

For some of you, AI is part of your everyday life, whether you are using it to summarize a large amount of information, brainstorm ideas for work, or research trips and personal purchases. Some of you interact with AI as little as possible, and prefer to keep it that way. And a lot of you are somewhere in between: curious, but exploring on your own terms and at your own pace.

Your personal use of AI is just that, personal. Firefox offers various levels of AI integration into your browser, and the choice between them is entirely yours.

Block new and current AI features in a single switch

Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That’s why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle.

Not only do we want people to have the choice to remove certain AI features from their Firefox browsing experience, we make sure doing so is as easy and accessible as possible.

Choose the features that work for you

For the many people who sit in the middle of the AI usage spectrum, we made sure you can opt in and out of specific features in line with your preferences. Capabilities like AI translations, image alt text in Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, and key points in link previews can all be individually switched on and off, ensuring you can enjoy such offerings on a case by case basis as it suits your needs. 

In addition, if there is an AI chatbot provider you already trust or pay for, you can use it directly inside Firefox’s built-in desktop sidebar. This means you can use your chatbot of choice and browse side by side without ping-ponging between tabs.

While some browsers integrate a singular AI model or chatbot into their system, this can restrict flexibility and concentrate data sharing. Firefox prioritizes transparency and user control by letting you select from multiple providers, allowing you to review each option’s policies before you engage with them.

You can turn on AI chatbot providers in the AI controls section of browser settings and select one of the following: Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Le Chat Mistral. Once this feature is turned on, you can switch between chatbots within the sidebar itself based on your preferences and task at hand.

Smart Window, for when you want help finishing what you started

Smart Window is Firefox’s most integrated AI experience, but that doesn’t mean it compromises our commitment to choice, privacy, and transparency. Our newest window type, which we’ve been polishing and testing in beta, uses only the context you share with it to help you move work forward and across the finish line.

When permitted by you, its built-in, AI-powered assistant can work directly with your open tabs and browsing history to connect the dots. This means comparing information, generating recommendations, summarizing pages, and planning projects without having to feed every crumb of context from your previous and current browsing activity each time you enter a new prompt.

As we’ve built out Smart Window, we’ve added a few additional features to align its design with how people actually browse. These include the ability to group related tabs together – so you can make sense of what’s open without spending time organizing everything yourself – and visual history previews that help you spot a page you visited earlier when you can’t remember the exact URL or phrase searched. In addition, a new partnership with Exa enables Smart Window to not only locate current web information to include in responses, but also display the sources behind these responses so you can verify what you’re seeing, without breaking your flow.

We understand people use different Firefox windows for different reasons, and often switch between options based on the task at hand. Smart Window is the window you reach for when your browsing turns into a project. When your quick search becomes inspo for the girls’ trip you’ve been meaning to plan, or finding the perfect gift for your partner becomes a dozen tabs comparing prices and reviews, turn the window you’re already using into a Smart Window. Your tabs and progress stay in place while Smart Window helps organize the task and move it forward. Use it for one complex project, use it all the time, or switch it back when you’re done.

Smart Window remains in beta as we continue to learn and improve from our community’s feedback. At present, it’s available in English to people in the U.S. and Canada.

To try Smart Window, visit: https://www.firefox.com/smart-window

Always your call

Your opinions and preferences on AI usage are individual to you.

We don’t think there is one right answer for how and when to engage with AI, and we’re not going to pretend there is one. What we can do is make sure that whatever level of engagement is right for you, Firefox supports it well. Because the only person telling you how much AI you need should be you.

The post AI on your terms: Firefox meets you where you are appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

People feel differently about AI, and here at Firefox, we think that is completely reasonable. Something else that is completely reasonable: deciding for yourself how and when you engage with AI features.

For some of you, AI is part of your everyday life, whether you are using it to summarize a large amount of information, brainstorm ideas for work, or research trips and personal purchases. Some of you interact with AI as little as possible, and prefer to keep it that way. And a lot of you are somewhere in between: curious, but exploring on your own terms and at your own pace.

Your personal use of AI is just that, personal. Firefox offers various levels of AI integration into your browser, and the choice between them is entirely yours.

Block new and current AI features in a single switch

Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That’s why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle.

Not only do we want people to have the choice to remove certain AI features from their Firefox browsing experience, we make sure doing so is as easy and accessible as possible.

Choose the features that work for you

For the many people who sit in the middle of the AI usage spectrum, we made sure you can opt in and out of specific features in line with your preferences. Capabilities like AI translations, image alt text in Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, and key points in link previews can all be individually switched on and off, ensuring you can enjoy such offerings on a case by case basis as it suits your needs. 

In addition, if there is an AI chatbot provider you already trust or pay for, you can use it directly inside Firefox’s built-in desktop sidebar. This means you can use your chatbot of choice and browse side by side without ping-ponging between tabs.

While some browsers integrate a singular AI model or chatbot into their system, this can restrict flexibility and concentrate data sharing. Firefox prioritizes transparency and user control by letting you select from multiple providers, allowing you to review each option’s policies before you engage with them.

You can turn on AI chatbot providers in the AI controls section of browser settings and select one of the following: Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Le Chat Mistral. Once this feature is turned on, you can switch between chatbots within the sidebar itself based on your preferences and task at hand.

Smart Window, for when you want help finishing what you started

Smart Window is Firefox’s most integrated AI experience, but that doesn’t mean it compromises our commitment to choice, privacy, and transparency. Our newest window type, which we’ve been polishing and testing in beta, uses only the context you share with it to help you move work forward and across the finish line.

When permitted by you, its built-in, AI-powered assistant can work directly with your open tabs and browsing history to connect the dots. This means comparing information, generating recommendations, summarizing pages, and planning projects without having to feed every crumb of context from your previous and current browsing activity each time you enter a new prompt.

As we’ve built out Smart Window, we’ve added a few additional features to align its design with how people actually browse. These include the ability to group related tabs together – so you can make sense of what’s open without spending time organizing everything yourself – and visual history previews that help you spot a page you visited earlier when you can’t remember the exact URL or phrase searched. In addition, a new partnership with Exa enables Smart Window to not only locate current web information to include in responses, but also display the sources behind these responses so you can verify what you’re seeing, without breaking your flow.

We understand people use different Firefox windows for different reasons, and often switch between options based on the task at hand. Smart Window is the window you reach for when your browsing turns into a project. When your quick search becomes inspo for the girls’ trip you’ve been meaning to plan, or finding the perfect gift for your partner becomes a dozen tabs comparing prices and reviews, turn the window you’re already using into a Smart Window. Your tabs and progress stay in place while Smart Window helps organize the task and move it forward. Use it for one complex project, use it all the time, or switch it back when you’re done.

Smart Window remains in beta as we continue to learn and improve from our community’s feedback. At present, it’s available in English to people in the U.S. and Canada.

To try Smart Window, visit: https://www.firefox.com/smart-window

Always your call

Your opinions and preferences on AI usage are individual to you.

We don’t think there is one right answer for how and when to engage with AI, and we’re not going to pretend there is one. What we can do is make sure that whatever level of engagement is right for you, Firefox supports it well. Because the only person telling you how much AI you need should be you.

The post AI on your terms: Firefox meets you where you are appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

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 155 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 155, several WebDriver bugs were fixed by contributors:

• Khalid AlHaddad updated the Mozilla-specific moz:debugging module to no longer rely on the same nested event loop API as DevTools, which prevents conflicts when WebDriver BiDi and DevTools are used in parallel.
• Nirmal Advani cleaned up our codebase by removing the executeSoon helper, which was just a thin wrapper on top of Services.tm.dispatchToMainThread().
• Nirmal Advani fixed the Actions API so that the dblclick event is fired when performing a double-click while holding down the Ctrl key on non-macOS platforms.
• Sameem added the cleanup logic for subscriptions when a browsing context is destroyed.
• Sameem removed support for the contexts argument in the session.unsubscribe command. From now on, clients can unsubscribe only by event names or subscription ids.

WebDriver code is written in JavaScript, Python, and Rust, so any web developer can contribute! Read how to set up 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!

All Changes

A complete list of developer-facing changes included in this Firefox release is available in the MDN Firefox 155 Release Notes.

For more than two decades, Mozilla has advocated for an internet where people, not powerful platforms, determine how technology works for them. Meaningful consumer choice requires more than the ability to select a browser. People should also be able to choose what their browser can do, from the privacy protections it provides to the ways they can customize their experience.

A recent Firefox product initiative brings that longstanding policy concern into focus.

Firefox is bringing a built-in Ad Blocker to Firefox for iOS, giving people an optional way to reduce intrusive ads and ad-related trackers while browsing. The feature uses an EasyList-based filter list and Apple’s WebKit Content Blocker framework. It is off by default and can be enabled or disabled at any time.

The feature responds to years of requests from Firefox users on iPhone. It also illustrates a wider policy problem: dominant mobile platforms can determine which privacy and customization tools competing browsers are able to offer.

On Firefox for desktop and Android, people can install add-ons that change how they experience the web.

Almost 40% of all Firefox users take advantage of this functionality. They include content blockers, accessibility tools, password managers and other extensions that allow people to shape their browser around their own priorities.

Firefox cannot offer that same add-on ecosystem on iOS. Apple’s App Review Guidelines generally require apps to remain self-contained and restrict them from downloading or executing code that introduces or changes an app’s functionality.

Apple also controls the conditions under which browsers may use alternative browser engines, with entitlement pathways available only in certain jurisdictions and subject to detailed requirements that no browser developer has been able to meet. In practice, the combined effect of Apple’s app distribution and browser policies prevents Mozilla from bringing the full Firefox add-on experience available on other platforms to iPhone users.

This is not simply a technical inconvenience but a competition and consumer-choice problem.

A mobile platform owner controls the operating system, the primary app-distribution channel and its own browser.

When that company can also determine which technologies, add-on models and operating-system capabilities competing browsers may use, it sets the boundaries within which browser competition takes place.

Operating system restrictions can prevent independent browsers from differentiating themselves.

Even when users want browsers to differentiate on privacy, operating system restrictions can prevent independent browsers from doing so. They can also force browser developers to recreate individual tools as platform-specific, built-in features rather than allowing people to choose from a broader add-on ecosystem. That increases development costs, slows or restricts innovation and produces uneven experiences across devices.

The new Firefox Ad Blocker is a practical response to those constraints. It gives iPhone users more control today using the technical options currently available to us. But building one feature directly into a browser is not a replacement for a healthy, independent add-on ecosystem. It addresses a specific capability gap for Firefox users on iOS at this time.

A competitive browser ecosystem should focus on the entire user experience.

The EU’s Digital Markets Act has shown that policy interventions can improve user choice, with Mozilla and other browsers reporting significant growth following the introduction of browser choice screens. However, meaningful browser competition must extend to the full user experience. This includes whether people can easily choose and change their default browser. It also includes whether people can benefit from the full set of innovations developed by rival browsers by ensuring adequate interoperability with the operating system.  With this deeper focus on the full user experience, people can benefit from differentiated privacy and security features.

People’s privacy choices should not depend on whether a dominant platform permits their browser to offer them.

 

The post Browsers compete on privacy. When the operating system allows. appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

There’s only so much room on your screen. Pop-ups, overlays, and ads can take over fast, getting between you and what you came to do.

That’s where Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS comes in: a built-in option that blocks many third-party ads and ad-related trackers before they load, helping reduce clutter and distractions while you browse. 

How it works

Ad Blocker uses Apple’s WebKit Content Blocker technology and the EasyList filter list to determine what gets blocked. There’s no separate extension to install, and you can turn it on in Settings > Browsing > Ad Blocker. It’s off by default, so you decide whether to use it.

Ad Blocker won’t block every ad. Ads served directly by the site you’re visiting and ads shown in search results will still appear. Sponsored shortcuts and other sponsored content shown by Firefox when you open a new tab are separate from ads on the web pages you visit, so Ad Blocker doesn’t affect them.

Ad Blocker works alongside the privacy protections already built into Firefox, including Enhanced Tracking Protection, which blocks many trackers and limits tracking across the web. 

More control over how you experience the web

On Desktop and Android, Firefox already supports a strong ecosystem of ad-blocking and privacy extensions, giving people the flexibility to choose the tools that work best for them. We value that ecosystem and will keep supporting it.

iOS works differently. Extensions aren’t available in the same way, and we know people want more options. Bringing ad blocking to Firefox on iOS meant building it directly into the browser. 

Giving people choice in how they experience the web is important to us. Advertising helps fund much of the open web, supporting the publishers, creators and websites people rely on. We also know that ads can sometimes crowd the screen or interrupt what you’re trying to do.

That’s why Ad Blocker is optional: you decide whether it’s part of how you browse. It’s part of a broader approach across Firefox to give you more control over your experience, from the extensions you use to how AI shows up in your browser.

Try it

To turn on Ad Blocker, go to Settings > Browsing > Ad Blocker.

If you find an ad you expected to be blocked, a site that behaves strangely or something we should improve, let us know on Mozilla Connect. 

Visit our Support page for more details on Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS. For more on Firefox’s built-in privacy protections, check out How Firefox Protects Your Data.

The post Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS: More control, fewer distractions appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.