These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 1

Every two weeks, engineering teams working on Firefox Desktop get together and update each other on things that they’re working on. These meetings are public. Details on how to join, as well as meeting notes, are available here.

We feel that the bleeding edge development state captured in those meeting notes might be interesting to our Nightly blog audience. To that end, we’re taking a page out of the Rust and Servo playbook, and offering you handpicked updates about what’s going on at the forefront of Firefox development!

Expect these every two weeks or so.

Thanks for using Nightly, and keep on rocking the free web!

Highlights

• In an effort to replace XUL themes with something better, jaws and mikedeboer sent out a survey to gather data on how people want to theme their browser.
  • Here are the initial results
  • And a blog post that interprets those results
• MattN announced that the Form Autofill project has been kicked off!
  • Check out the excellent UX spec
  • The current plan is to design and implement this as a System Add-on
  • Development kick-off and mailing list coming soon!
• After analyzing performance and stability data, mconley and felipe report that we are green-lit to ship e10s to release users that have the add-ons on this whitelist installed, as well as WebExtensions. The plan is to do this in 49.
• To help with porting / transitioning, andym reports that the Add-ons Team is landing the ability for WebExtension APIs to be used from SDK and bootstrap.js extension. Stay tuned for official word from the team.
• A reminder that Firefox 49 release is scheduled for September 20th

Contributor(s) of the Week

• The team has nominated Adam (adamgj.wong), who has helped clean-up some of our Telemetry APIs. Great work, Adam!

Project Updates

Add-ons

• andym wants to remind everybody that the Add-ons team is still triaging and fixing SDK bugs (like this one, for example).

Electrolysis (e10s)

• mconley reports that a11y and touchscreen support landed in 51, but might not go out in that release, as there are still a few bad bugs with it.
• mconley also wants everybody to know that we’re currently on track to ship Firefox with two content processes by default in Firefox 52, so stay tuned for that.

Core Engineering

• ksteuber rewrote the Snappy Symbolication Server (mainly used for the Gecko Profiler for Windows builds) and this will be deployed soon.
• felipe is in the process of designing experiment mechanisms for testing different behaviours for Flash (allowing some, denying some, click-to-play some, based on heuristics)

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

• mconley is refactoring the “unsubmitted crash report” notification, as well as allowing users to always submit backlogged crash reports
• jessica and scottwu are working hard on the Date / Time form field work, and reviews have been given for both the layout and picker parts of the project
• daleharvey is working on a fallback for the GMP downloader in case AUS goes down

Quality of Experience

• mikedeboer has re-enabled the new Find in Page mode on Nightly, and is working on fixing performance and behaviour bugs
• dao continues on his quest to improve the default theme in high-contrast display settings

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• kitcambridge reports that tcsc has implemented atomic uploads for Sync on desktop
• There are other Sync engine improvements in the pipe and coming to a build near you soon!

Uncategorized

• A discussion is underway in firefox-dev concerning the organization of tests, and how “Firefox UI” tests fit in. These will likely be put in “puppeteer” subdirectories.

Here are the raw meeting notes that were used to derive this list.

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