You’ve got mail! Who doesn’t these days? With the number of business and consumer emails sent and received every day expected to exceed 293 billion this year, according to the Radicati Group, it seems everyone’s got mail.

One downside to such a volume of email is that most inboxes are cluttered and unmanageable. While many email users opt for utilizing multiple services such as Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo to tame the mess and keep personal emails from getting mixed up with work emails, it is still a challenge.

One method for reigning in emails and keeping your accounts separate without the hassles many email clients come with is using a free email program that Kim recommends, Mozilla Thunderbird. This handy tool works across all platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux systems, and Android and Apple devices.

• Mike Hommey: Reproducing the Linux builds of Firefox 68

  Starting with Firefox 68, the Linux builds shipped by Mozilla should be reproducible (it is not currently automatically validated that it definitely is, but 68.0 is). These builds are optimized with Profile Guided Optimization, and the profile data was not kept and published until recently, which is why they weren’t reproducible until now.

  The following instructions require running Docker on a Linux host (this may or may not work on a non-Linux host, I don’t know what e.g. Docker for Mac does, and if the docker support in the mach command works with it). I’ll try to make them generic enough that they may apply to any subsequent release of Firefox.

• Mozilla Releases Firefox 68 as the Next ESR Series with Cryptomining Protection

  Mozilla officially released today the Firefox 68 web browser for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac, and Windows, making it an ESR (Extended Support Release) version.
  The popular open-source and cross-platform Firefox web browser from Mozilla has been updated to version 68.0, a major release that expands the dark mode in the reader view to make the controls, toolbars, and sidebars on windows dark too. Additionally, Firefox 68 introduces new cryptomining and fingerprinting protections to strict content blocking settings.

  Firefox 68 also improves add-on security and discovery by introducing a Recommended Extensions program in about:addons to help users easily find high quality and secure add-ons and themes, a new reporting feature in about:addons to let users quickly report security and performance issues with add-ons, and revamp the extensions dashboard in about:addons.

• Dave Townsend: Please watch your character encodings

  I started writing this as a newsgroup post for one of Mozilla’s mailing lists, but it turned out to be too long and since this part was mainly aimed at folks who either didn’t know about or wanted a quick refresher on character encodings I decided to blog it instead. Please let me know if there are errors in here, I am by no means an expert on this stuff either and I do get caught out sometimes!

  Text is tricky. Unicode supports the notion of 1,114,112 distinct characters, slightly more than a byte of memory can hold. So to store a character we have to use a way of encoding its value into bytes in memory. A straightforward encoding would just use three bytes per character. But (roughly) the larger the character value the less often it is used, and memory is precious, so often variable length encodings are used. These will use fewer bytes in memory for characters earlier in the range at the cost of using a little more memory for the rarer characters. Common encodings include UTF-8 (one byte for ASCII characters, up to four bytes for other characters) and UTF-16 (two bytes for most characters, four bytes for less used ones).

  What does this mean?

• Grizzly Browser Fuzzing Framework

  At Mozilla, we rely heavily on automation to increase our ability to fuzz Firefox and the components from which it is built. Our fuzzing team is constantly developing tools to help integrate new and existing capabilities into our workflow with a heavy emphasis on scaling. Today we would like to share Grizzly – a browser fuzzing framework that has enabled us to quickly and effectively deploy fuzzers at scale.

  Grizzly was designed to allow fuzzer developers to focus solely on writing fuzzers and not worry about the overhead of creating tools and scripts to run them. It was created as a platform for our team to run internal and external fuzzers in a common way using shared tools. It is cross-platform and supports running multiple instances in parallel.

We recently closed the first half of 2019 and with that it is time to look back and do a quick summary of what the media team has achieved during this 6 months period.

Looking at some stats, we merged 87 Pull Requests, we opened 56 issues, we closed 42 issues and we welcomed 13 new amazing contributors to the media stack.

• Say WHAAAT? Mozilla has Been Nominated for the “Internet Villain” Award in the UK

  Mozilla Firefox is one of the most popular browsers available out there. A lot of users prefer it over Chrome just because it encourages privacy protection and features options to keep your Internet activity as private as possible.

  But, one of the recently proposed features – DoH (DNS-over-HTTPS) which is still in the testing phase didn’t receive a good response from the UK’s ISPs trade association.

  So, the ISPA (Internet Services Providers Association) of UK decided to nominate Mozilla as one of the “Internet Villains” among the nominees for 2019. This is for an award ceremony to be held on 11th July in London by the ISP trade association of the UK.

• Firefox 68 new contributors

  With the release of Firefox 68, we are pleased to welcome the 55 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 49 of whom were brand new volunteers! Please join us in thanking each of these diligent and enthusiastic individuals, and take a look at their contributions...

• Mozilla’s Latest Research Grants: Prioritizing Research for the Internet

  We are very happy to announce the results of our Mozilla Research Grants for the first half of 2019. This was an extremely competitive process, and we selected proposals which address twelve strategic priorities for the internet and for Mozilla. This includes researching better support for integrating Tor in the browser, improving scientific notebooks, using speech on mobile phones in India, and alternatives to advertising for funding the internet. The Mozilla Research Grants program is part of our commitment to being a world-class example of using inclusive innovation to impact culture, and reflects Mozilla’s commitment to open innovation.

  We will open a new round of grants in Fall of 2019. See our Research Grant webpage for more details and to sign up to be notified when applications open.