The Firefox Desktop team met yet again last Tuesday to share updates. Here are some fresh updates that we think you might find interesting:
Highlights
- The add-ons team is landing more WebExtension APIs, namely: identity, topSites, omniBox
- If you’re interested in keeping tabs on what WebExtension work is in the pipe, check out their public Trello board
- jaws and mikedeboer are working on the new theming API in the Cedar twig repository. Once ready, it will merge into mozilla-central.
- Recently landed on Cedar is the ability to set the background image of about:home
- In an effort to reduce e10s tab switch spinners, billm landed a patch that lets us pause GCs to force a paint
- ddurst happily reports that Nightly is currently blocking all NPAPI plugins except for Flash!
- This is done behind a pref, which will be disabled for ESR 52, but enabled for release 52. In the next cycle, the pref will be removed and this will be hardcoded.
- ddurst also reports that the stub installer will soon be able to install 64-bit versions of Firefox on supported systems
- nhnt11 has returned from his time off, and will now continue his captive portal work!
Contributor(s) of the Week
- adamg2 helped to make the Histograms.json parser more bulletproof!
- Ajay freed us all from some unnecessary code within Telemetry!
- Saad fixed a bug in the AwesomeBar that would occur if a hex code was put in as an address!
- Thauã Silveira added a new Telemetry probe so that we can get a sense of how often people abort print jobs!
Project Updates
Context Graph
- tobyelliot reports that the Recommendation Engine Experiment has gathered over 2000 volunteer participants
Electrolysis (e10s)
- mconley has landed a patch that will annotate hangs that occur in the main thread in the content process during tab switch
- This should give the team important clues on what kinds of things are causing tab switch spinners
- mrbkap has started an etherpad the brainstorm ways in which e10s-multi might accidentally break some add-ons
Platform UI
- MSU students continue to improve the <select> dropdown
- Mark has landed the first restyling patch in Nightly
- tmacklebust and beachjar are making steady progress on the “find” feature, and patches are almost ready for review
- Fred_ and miguel have a patch to combine the e10s and non-e10s dropdown mechanisms up for review
- seanlee is working on making the autocomplete popup for logins warn you if the form you’re submitting is insecure
- jessica’s patch to add the layout for <input type=”time”> has landed in Nightly, and scottwu’s patch to add the picker has passed review and should land shortly!
Privacy / Security
- A patch by florian is being reviewed that adds a “Temporarily Blocked” permission state to the permission panel
- past has a patch being reviewed to convert our content permission popup notifications to have 2 visible buttons instead of the current drop down menu
Search
- mak fixed a regression in how we collect Telemetry on how many searches are completed within the AwesomeBar
Here are the raw meeting notes that were used to derive this list.
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heubergen
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