Blog
Participating in the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund
We've been keeping a secret for a little while! I'm excited to finally share that urllib3 participated in Session 3 of the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund as part of a cohort of 67 critical projects. Fellow maintainer Quentin Pradet and I leveraged this support to fortify the library you all rely on through proactive security hardening.
February 22, 2026
urllib3 entered the "Billion-a-Month" club in 2025
Welcome to the 2025 annual report for urllib3. I’m Illia, and this is my first time writing this update for the second most downloaded Python package. Long-time readers will recognize these reports from Seth Larson or Quentin Pradet, but this year I’m taking the baton to share what we’ve been up to. 2025 was a busy year defined by security hardening and future-proofing. We released 5 versions and merged over 100 pull requests, working to secure the library and prepare it for Python 3.14. For the first time ever, urllib3 was installed over 1 billion times per month consistently throughout the last quarter, signaling new levels of adoption for both the Python language and foundational open source libraries like urllib3.
January 20, 2026
