These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 2

As is fortnightly tradition, the Firefox Desktop team rallied together last Tuesday to share notes and ramblings on things that are going on. Here are some hand-picked, artisinal updates from your friendly neighbourhood Firefox team:

Highlights

• With Firefox 49 (and 49.0.1) out the door, e10s has now been enabled for users that have WebExtensions enabled and the add-ons on this list only.
• e10s has been temporarily disabled for users with a ru-* locale due to bug 1294719
• The e10s team is investigating reports of users on the release channel seeing many occurrences of the tab switch spinner. Investigation is being tracked in this bug. The e10s roll-out system add-on is being modified to disable e10s for users that see the spinner too often
• mconley added a new API for system add-ons to prompt the user for permissions.
• Did you know that you can still use your own Sync server? And now tcsc has made it even easier to configure Firefox to use it!
• WillWang has a plan to not show the Save As / Preview dialog if a clicked link is not previewable
• seanlee put together a cheat sheet for folks who want to contribute to Firefox who are more comfortable with Git than Mercurial

Contributor(s) of the Week

• Filipe removed Cortana support from Firefox, since Microsoft has hard-coded Cortana to only open links in Edge
• adamg2 helped clean up part of the Telemetry API
• kxnikx helped to make some of our arrow panel CSS variables more clear
• Amal Santosh helped to fix an error in the CSS for about:networking

Project Updates

Add-ons

• The Add-ons Team published a document on how to use WebExtension APIs within bootstrap.js and SDK add-ons for easier migration

Context Graph

• The Context Graph team is working on prototyping a new mobile experience
• Keep an eye on this wiki page if you’re curious about what the Context Graph team is up to

Firefox Core Engineering

• chutten landed a patch that allows aggregation of content process Telemetry in the main process!

Form Auto-fill

• The system add-on stub for the Form Auto-fill project has landed
• The team no longer plans on using a bootstrap.js/WebExt hybrid because the only thing we were hoping to use WebExtensions for isn’t yet supported
• The Form Auto-fill Team had a kick-off workweek was last week in Taipei. Here’s a summary on their shiny new mailing list, which you should totally subscribe to!

Privacy / Security

• florian has a work-in-progres patch that will show a preview in the screen sharing permission prompt

Quality of Experience

• Gijs is running an experiment on to see how auto-migration works in the wild on both the beta channel and on a subset of our release population
• Bas fixed a bug in the graphics layer that jaws found, which should improve the performance of the arrow panel animation – specifically, the menu panel
• “Modal” find highlight is turned on again and many performance improvements have landed. mikedeboer is drilling down on some remaining bugs so that we can turn it on by default

Storage Management

• There’s a proposal to improve the management of long duration storage  in Preferences
• This is the current proposal, though it is still very much in flux
• Here’s the metabug for storage management in Firefox

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

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