Firefox Contributions

A series documenting my patches to Mozilla Firefox as a Privacy Engineering intern.

This series covers my contributions to Firefox’s privacy and security features. Each post documents a specific patch—the problem, implementation, and what I learned.

The Patches

1. Notification Permission Telemetry — Instrumenting the permission prompt funnel with Glean metrics
2. Telemetry: Revocation Events — Adding toolbar and preferences revocation tracking
3. SmartBlock Link Preservation — Preserving embed content when trackers are blocked
4. Clear Data Dialog Cleanup — Removing legacy UI code
5. Privacy Metrics: Design & Data Foundation — Designing a New Tab widget for privacy stats
6. Privacy Metrics: Implementation — Building the data pipeline with Redux and Feeds
7. Privacy Metrics: UI & Testing — React component, localization, and testing

Why Firefox?

Firefox’s codebase is massive (~20 million lines), but it’s also one of the most well-documented open source projects. Contributing here taught me:

• How to navigate a decades-old codebase
• Mozilla’s code review culture (rigorous but supportive)
• The intersection of privacy engineering and user experience
• How telemetry informs product decisions without compromising privacy